Research Engineer

The role

You will work on robotics, computer vision and multimodal research in data curation, annotation, evaluation and quality control. You will build working prototypes and partner with ML systems and Product Engineering teammates to bring ideas into the platform.

What you will do

• Form hypotheses, design experiments, and drive original research on open problems
• Research and prototype agentic workflows which can handle multimodal inputs and diverse customer ontologies
• Advance 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
• Partner with ML systems and Product Engineering teammates to bring prototypes into the platform
• Help shape longer-term research direction
• Publish research papers and present work at conferences and workshops

Required qualifications

• A PhD in computer vision, machine learning or a related field, or equivalent applied research experience
• A strong background in computer vision and multimodal ML, whether in traditional CV, modern VLMs and embedding models, or both
• Clear evidence of independent research, such as publications, a thesis, open-source work or applied research where you owned the original contribution
• Solid mathematical foundations in statistics, probability and linear algebra
• Strong Python and PyTorch skills
• Experience running experiments end-to-end
• A genuine interest in data-centric AI: curation, evaluation and data quality

Nice to have

• experience applying LLM-based agents to visual tasks
• working with video, 3D or other complex data types

Benefits

• Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity
• Clear, accelerated growth opportunities
• Strong in-person culture: 4 days/week
• Daily team lunches & dinners
• Annual learning & development budget
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• US employees: 18 paid vacation days plus US public holidays
• UK employees: 25 paid vacation days plus UK public holidays
• Frequent travel opportunities across the U.S., London, and Europe
• Bi-annual company offsites & monthly socials

Before you apply

• We’ll start reviewing applications from 1 November 2026

About the company

Encord is the data layer for Physical AI and enterprise, serving as core infrastructure for 300+ of the world's leading AI teams. They are a team of founders, scientists, quants, researchers, and former Olympians.