Research Engineer Job Description Template

The research engineer builds the software that makes research possible: training infrastructure, experiment frameworks, data tooling and efficient implementations of new methods. The role pairs with scientists and is often the reason a research team can iterate quickly, since a great deal of research velocity comes down to engineering quality.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

• Build and maintain research infrastructure and experiment tooling
• Implement research methods efficiently and correctly
• Optimize training throughput and resource utilization
• Build data pipelines for research datasets
• Reproduce published results as baselines
• Profile and remove bottlenecks in training and evaluation
• Maintain reproducibility across experiments
• Support scientists with engineering problems
• Contribute to open source research code where appropriate
• Help transfer research results into production systems

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science or a related field

Required Skills and Experience

• 3+ years of engineering work supporting machine learning research
• Strong Python and deep learning framework internals knowledge
• Experience optimizing training performance
• Ability to implement methods correctly from papers
• Good software engineering practice in a research setting
• Experience with distributed or multi GPU training
• Comfort working with scientists on ambiguous requirements
• Reproducibility discipline

Preferred Qualifications

• Contributions to open source research code
• Experience with CUDA or low level performance work