SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Encord is seeking a Senior Research Engineer to join its ML team and tackle longer-term, bigger-picture problems in AI data production. The role focuses on building agentic systems that can reason about data similarly to human reviewers, moving beyond fast, practical wins to foundational solutions.
Key responsibilities include:
- Research and prototype agentic workflows to automate data pipeline tasks, starting with quality control agents that review outputs against customer ontologies
- Explore how vision language models (VLMs) and multimodal models can reason about visual data with reduced direct supervision
- Advance work on data curation and model evaluation
- Design approaches that adapt quickly to new ontologies, data types, and customer needs rather than solving isolated problems
- Convert promising research into working prototypes and partner with engineering to integrate them into the production platform
- Stay current with latest research in computer vision, multimodal models, and agents, bringing relevant ideas to the team
You'll work closely with product, engineering, and the human data team, with real influence over the ML roadmap and technical direction. The role offers ownership and scope to set the bar for ML engineering at a fast-growing company.
The team is small and hands-on, with room to shape research focus around your strengths. You'll join a company used by hundreds of AI teams worldwide.
Requirements:
- Strong background in computer vision or multimodal ML, demonstrated through a PhD, MSc, or equivalent industry experience
- Hands-on experience with VLMs, multimodal models, or agentic systems
- Strong Python and PyTorch skills with end-to-end experiment execution experience
- 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
