Research Engineer

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production. Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more.

We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

We're looking for a Research Engineer to join Encord's ML team. You'll work on robotics, computer vision and multimodal research in data curation, annotation, evaluation and quality control, with successful work going into the core product. We face a variety of interesting research problems across the full data life-cycle, including annotation, quality control, verification and curation. We are looking to strengthen our team to build upon and extend our market-leading platform. The kind of problems we solve are constantly evolving alongside the needs of our frontier customers, including many of the leading robotics and physical AI teams. Join us as we leverage our massive flow of proprietary data on our journey to develop generalised solutions applicable across diverse multi-modal tasks.

Form hypotheses, design experiments, and drive original research on open problems from leading robotics and AI customers

Research and prototype agentic workflows which can handle multimodal inputs and diverse customer ontologies

Advance our work on data curation and model evaluation

Tackle egocentric video understanding, from captioning to deeper 3d understanding

Build working prototypes to test ideas end to end, then partner with our ML systems and Product Engineering teammates to bring them into the platform

Help shape our longer-term research direction and bring the most relevant ideas from the field back to the team

Publish research papers and present your work at conferences and workshops

A builder with a research mindset. You can take an open-ended problem, form a hypothesis and get to a working prototype without a detailed spec.

A first-principles problem solver. You lean on strong fundamentals rather than surface-level familiarity with the latest trends.

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

A multiplier. You raise the level of the team around you by shaping research direction, mentoring others and turning findings into decisions.

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