Job Description
Research Software Engineer - AI Research & Community Technology Team
Cambridge area (Hybrid working available)
We are partnering with an interdisciplinary research team working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and community‑centred technology design. Work explores how communities can meaningfully contribute to the development, evaluation, and oversight of AI systems.
Details:
This Research Software Engineer role provides hands‑on engineering support during a period of maternity cover, helping maintain momentum across several active research initiatives.
You will take ownership of day‑to‑day technical work spanning research platform development, model evaluation, data management, and research operations. The role plays an important part in supporting human studies, community deployments, and evaluation workflows—ensuring that community input can be collected, processed, analysed, and incorporated into ongoing research efforts.
This position suits someone who enjoys working in evolving research environments, collaborating across disciplines, and building reliable systems that support rapid experimentation while maintaining good engineering practices.
Key Responsibilities:
* Develop and maintain a research platform supporting human‑in‑the‑loop evaluation, feedback tasks, and synthetic data workflows, including new experimental API and UI features (e.g. using FastAPI and React).
* Extend model evaluation pipelines, including quantitative metrics, qualitative review workflows, and quality tracking across experiments and human studies.
* Build tools for data generation, analysis, and exploration to support research into model capabilities, user testing, and experimental studies.
* Support community and partner deployments, including evaluation task setup, platform readiness, and technical issue triage during live research engagements.
* Manage data ingestion and post‑engagement processing to ensure datasets are ready for downstream analysis and evaluation.
* Contribute to effective development workflows, using modern tooling to improve delivery pace and code quality.
* Maintain solid engineering standards, including testing, documentation, and general codebase health.
Qualifications and Experience:
* PhD in computer science, machine learning, software engineering, or a related field, or equivalent industry or applied research experience.
* Strong software engineering skills in Python, with experience building maintainable systems for research platforms, evaluation workflows, or data pipelines.
* Excellent analytical and problem‑solving skills, particularly in ambiguous or evolving research contexts.
* Experience translating high‑level or exploratory research goals into practical technical solutions.
* Familiarity with machine learning experimentation, model evaluation, human‑in‑the‑loop systems, or human‑centred AI research.
* Experience with technologies such as FastAPI, React, cloud services, containerised systems, or data pipelines.
Preferred:
* Experience working with research or community‑contributed datasets.
* Background in building tools for data analysis, user studies, or evaluation research.
Contract Details:
* PAYE Contract
* 12 Months Contract
* Hybrid Working
Please apply for immediate consideration.