AI Research Engineer Job Description Template

The AI research engineer works at the boundary between research and production, implementing and adapting new methods and assessing whether they are genuinely better for the organization’s problems. The role requires the ability to read current literature critically and the engineering skill to test it properly rather than accepting a paper’s own evaluation.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

• Implement and evaluate methods from recent research
• Design fair comparisons against existing approaches
• Adapt research methods to the organization’s data and constraints
• Build infrastructure supporting rapid experimentation
• Assess whether reported improvements hold in practice
• Transfer successful methods into production systems
• Track developments in the field and advise on their relevance
• Document experiments and results including negative ones
• Collaborate with production engineers on deployment
• Present findings internally

Education

• Master’s or PhD in computer science, machine learning or a related field

Required Skills and Experience

• 3+ years bridging research and engineering
• Ability to implement methods accurately from papers
• Strong Python and deep learning framework skills
• Rigorous comparison methodology
• Healthy skepticism about published improvements
• Engineering skill sufficient to build experimental infrastructure
• Clear written communication of results
• Judgment about which research is worth pursuing

Preferred Qualifications

• Publication record
• Experience shipping a research derived system