AI Research Engineer
UK Visa Sponsorship Analytics
Above analytics are generated algorithmically based on job titles and may not always be the same as the company's job classification. You can also check detailed occupation eligibility, and salary criteria on our UK Visa Eligible Occupations & Salary Thresholds page.
Disclaimer: Hunt UK Visa Sponsors aggregates job listings from publicly available sources, such as search engines, to assist with your job hunting. We do not claim affiliation with Wave Group. For the most up-to-date job details, please visit the official website by clicking "Apply Now."
💻 Job Title: AI Research Engineer
💰 Salary: £80-150k (DOE)
- + very generous equity (50% of your salary) 📈
📍 Location: Soho (3 office days/week)
🌴 Benefits:
- Unlimited annual leave + remote working around holidays if you wish
- 8% employer pension contribution
- Comprehensive health insurance
- £1,000 L&D budget to use as you see fit
📊 Industry: B2B - AI Research - Synthetic Data
👥 Team: ~25
💸 Funding: ~$15m (Series A)
🛂 VISA sponsorship available if needed
This early-stage, well-funded start up is building advanced AI systems that model and simulate complex real-world behaviour at scale. Their platform enables organisations to test decisions, scenarios and strategies using large-scale AI-driven simulations, dramatically reducing time-to-insight compared to traditional approaches.
Following a strong early traction and funding injection, they're looking for 2x AI Engineers with deep Research expertise to join a small, highly technical team working at the intersection of large language models, agent systems and scalable backend infrastructure.
In this role, you’ll work across agent cognition, memory, reasoning and orchestration, while ensuring the underlying platform is performant, cost-efficient and production-ready. You'll be:
- formulating research questions about human / agent behaviour
- designing experiments on synthetic populations
- validating model behaviour against real-world data
- deciding what architectures and methods should exist, not just implementing them
The perfect candidate would ideally have experience with LLMs / agent development as well as backend engineering
making it ideal for someone who enjoys experimentation and research-driven iteration, but also cares about robust system design and real-world deployment.
✅ Must have requirements:
- PhD / MSc or substantial research experience in AI, ML, CS, Cognitive Science, Physics, Mathematics, or a related field
- Demonstrated ability to conduct independent, hypothesis-driven research
- Strong grounding in experimental design, statistical validation, quantitative evaluation
- Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python and backend frameworks like FastAPI, Flask, Django
- Hands-on experience working with ML / AI models (LLMs, NLP, simulation, or related areas)
- Comfortable working in ambiguity, where the right question is often unclear at the start
👍 Bonus points for:
- Familiarity with fine-tuning workflows, model optimisation and experiment tracking
- Experience with multi-agent systems, simulations or agent-based modelling
- Experience building workflows/agents on top of existing models
- Experience with relational databases and vector search / embedding systems
- Knowledge of cloud infrastructure, containerisation and deploying ML systems to production
- Experience working in fast-moving environments with evolving requirements