Research Engineer

About us

We're looking for a Research Engineer to join our ML team and work on the longer-term, bigger-picture problems that will change how AI data gets produced. Much of our current ML work focuses on fast, practical wins. This role is about building towards what comes next: agents that can reason about data the way a human reviewer would.

Quality control is a good example. Our customers' ontologies change constantly (one changes theirs every couple of days), so a model fitted to a single ontology is obsolete almost as soon as it ships. Instead, we want systems that can take in an ontology, look at multimodal outputs, and decide whether they're correct, incorrect or need a human to step in. Solving that means designing general approaches rather than one-off fixes.

The role

We're looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to own how we bring state-of-the-art computer vision and multimodal models into a production platform used by hundreds of AI teams worldwide. You'll take ambiguous, often unsolved problems, decide how to approach them, and see them through from research to reliable, scalable features in production

You'll work closely with product, engineering and our human data team, and have real influence over our ML roadmap, technical direction and how the team grows. If you want ownership, scope and the chance to set the bar for ML engineering at a fast-growing company, we'd love to talk.

You'll join a small, hands-on ML team and work closely with our human data and engineering teams. You'll also have plenty of room to shape your research focus around your strengths.

What you'll do

• Research and prototype agentic workflows that automate more of the data pipeline, starting with quality control agents that review outputs against a customer's ontology

• Explore how VLMs and multimodal models can reason about visual data with less direct supervision

• Push forward our work on data curation and model evaluation

• Design approaches that adapt quickly to new ontologies, data types and customer needs, rather than solving one problem at a time

• Turn promising research into working prototypes, and partner with engineering to bring them into the platform

• Follow the latest research in computer vision, multimodal models and agents, and bring the most relevant ideas back to the team

   

Who we're looking for

• A builder with a research mindset. You're comfortable with open-ended problems and can take an idea to a working prototype without a detailed spec.

• A big-picture thinker. You're excited by ambitious, longer-term problems and know how to break them into meaningful steps.

• A clear communicator. You can explain your thinking to researchers, engineers and customer-facing teams alike.

Experience requirements

• A strong background in computer vision or multimodal ML, through a PhD, MSc or equivalent industry experience

• Hands-on experience with VLMs, multimodal models or agentic systems

• Strong Python and PyTorch skills, and experience running experiments end-to-end

• A genuine interest in data-centric AI: curation, evaluation and data quality

• Bonus: publications or open-source work in relevant areas; experience applying LLM-based agents to visual tasks; experience with video, 3D or other complex data types

Why Encord

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup

• Strong in-person culture — most of the team works from our London office 4+ days/week

• 25 days annual leave + UK public holidays

• Annual learning & development budget

• Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe

• Daily company lunches

• Monthly socials & bi-annual team offsites