R&D Engineer

The role

You will design and develop neural network architectures for YOLO models. You will turn research papers into performant architectures and production-ready model designs.

What you will do

• Research, design, and build novel neural network architectures for next-generation YOLO models.
• Develop core components including backbones, necks, heads, attention modules, and efficient building blocks.
• Read, reproduce, and extend cutting-edge papers into working model architectures from scratch.
• Run rigorous ablation studies and large-scale architecture experiments across standard benchmarks.
• Improve accuracy, latency, and scaling through distillation, pruning, and quantization-aware design.
• Build training recipes and evaluation pipelines for detection, segmentation, pose, and new vision tasks.
• Partner with R&D and engineering teams to turn research ideas into production-ready open-source models.
• Contribute to foundational model initiatives that support future YOLO and broader vision systems.
• Take ownership of assigned R&D tasks beyond architecture work.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in computer vision and deep learning with architecture design expertise.
• Proven success building models from the ground up, not just fine-tuning pretrained checkpoints.
• Expert-level Python and deep proficiency in PyTorch, including custom layers, modules, and training loops.
• Strong command of convolutions, attention, normalization, optimization, and loss design fundamentals.
• Ability to read a research paper and implement it faithfully and efficiently from scratch.
• Experience with efficiency research such as quantization, pruning, distillation, or neural architecture search.
• Strong portfolio of research contributions through papers, preprints, open-source code, or original model work.
• High ownership, adaptability, and comfort operating in a fast-moving research environment.

Nice to have

• Published research at venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, or ICLR.
• Experience with distributed training, mixed precision, CUDA profiling, or model deployment constraints.
• Active open-source presence with architecture-focused repositories and meaningful community adoption.
• Familiarity with the Ultralytics Python package, documentation, or community forum.
• History of taking original research from prototype to models others actually use.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Equity packages
• Global collaboration
• Flexible working hours
• 24 vacation days
• Your birthday off
• Local holidays
• Tech & tools
• Brand-new Apple MacBook Air/Pro, Apple Studio Display, and AirPods Pro 3
• Dedicated budget for personal and professional growth

About the company

Ultralytics is the creator of the world's leading open-source YOLO models. The company is on a mission to simplify AI for everyone.