Applied Research Engineer – New Grad / Early Career

🔒 Confidential Employer
Posted 24 March 2026
LOCATION
Central London
TYPE
Full-time
LEVEL
Entry-level
SALARY
£60,000 / year
CATEGORY
Technology
This employer holds a UK Home Office sponsor license — sponsorship for this specific role is at the employer’s discretion

SKILLS

Applied Machine Learning (ML) Natural Language Processing (NLP) Python Programming Document Processing Evaluation Method Design Retrieval Quality Improvement

FULL DESCRIPTION

Applied Research Engineer – New Grad / Early Career

Full-Time

36000 - 60000 £ / year (est.)

No home office possible

At a Glance

  • Tasks: Work on real-world LLM systems and improve AI document processing.
  • Company: Fast-growing, YC-backed LegalTech AI company with a high technical bar.
  • Benefits: Competitive salary, hands-on experience, and opportunity to work in Central London.
  • Why this job: Join an elite team and make a tangible impact in the AI industry.
  • Qualifications: MSc or PhD in CS/ML/NLP with strong applied ML research background.
  • Other info: Collaborative environment with opportunities for rapid career growth.

The predicted salary is between 36000 - 60000 £ per year.

Do you want to work on LLM systems that ship to real users, not just papers? Have you published at top AI venues and want to build in industry full time? Are you ready to join a small, elite team with a genuinely high technical bar? A fast-scaling, YC-backed LegalTech AI company is building GenAI systems across document processing, draft generation and information retrieval. Their platform is already used by hundreds of legal teams globally, and they’re now expanding their AI group as they scale in London and internationally. This is not a generic graduate role. They’re looking for exceptional early-career research engineers who can combine strong academic foundations with practical engineering execution.

The role

You will work on applied research problems directly connected to production GenAI systems: improving retrieval, reasoning quality, grounding, evaluation, and system robustness across large, complex document corpora.

Key responsibilities

  • Build and iterate on LLM + RAG pipelines over technical/legal documents
  • Design evaluation methods to improve correctness, faithfulness, and reliability
  • Improve retrieval quality (chunking, ranking, metadata strategies, failure analysis)
  • Prototype and productionise applied research ideas into product workflows
  • Collaborate closely with backend/full-stack engineers to deploy features end-to-end

What they’re looking for

  • New Grad / Early Career, ideally MSc or PhD in CS/ML/NLP (or related)
  • Strong applied ML research background, ideally with publications in top venues such as: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI (added bonus)
  • Strong engineering fundamentals in Python
  • Comfortable working in real codebases (not just notebooks)
  • Product-minded: enjoys turning research into shipped systems
  • Happy working onsite 5 days per week in Central London

Interested? Please apply below.

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