AI Research Engineer​/Senior AI Research Engineer

The University of Sheffield is a remarkable place to work. Our people are at the heart of everything we do. Their diverse backgrounds, abilities and beliefs make Sheffield a world‑class university. We offer a fantastic range of benefits including a highly competitive annual leave entitlement (with the ability to purchase more), a generous pension scheme, flexible working opportunities, a commitment to your development and wellbeing, a wide range of retail discounts, and much more.

Find out more about our benefits (opens in a new window) and join us to become part of something special.

You will join the AI Research Engineering team within the University of Sheffield’s Centre for Machine Intelligence, supporting the UKRI‑EPSRC funded UK Open Multimodal AI Network’s flagship Open Multimodal AI Benchmark (OMAIB) initiative. OMAIB develops open, community‑driven datasets, evaluation protocols, baseline models, and deployment‑centric tasks to accelerate multimodal AI solutions for tomorrow’s engineering research challenges. As an AI Research Engineer, you will work on cross‑cutting technologies that support a portfolio of short, high‑impact projects funded through OMAIB calls.

These span domains such as healthcare, materials discovery, and transportation systems. You will collaborate with Principal Investigators, industry partners, and end‑user stakeholders to provide the research and software engineering expertise needed to deliver robust, reproducible, and openly accessible outputs. Your role will include working with other teams to implement multimodal AI solutions using best‑practice software engineering and open science principles, maintaining OMAIB infrastructure such as repositories, documentation, and leaderboards on Git Hub, developing models in PyTorch or related frameworks, and supporting project teams to prepare datasets, code, and evaluation protocols.

The role offers variety and opportunities to shape national‑scale open research infrastructure. You will be part of a collaborative team of AI Research Engineers enabling interdisciplinary research and engaging widely with researchers, industry, and policymakers.

• Develop findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) AI / machine learning software, tools, and workflows to support multiple exploratory, high‑impact OMAIB‑funded projects across diverse domains.
• Build, deploy, and maintain multimodal AI prototypes and models using frameworks such as PyTorch, ensuring reproducibility and robustness.
• Build, maintain and enhance central OMAIB technical infrastructure, including open‑source repositories, documentation platforms, and benchmarking leaderboards on Git Hub.
• Work closely with project teams to advise on AI / machine learning approaches, data integration, and evaluation protocols, ensuring alignment with OMAIB’s open research principles and deployment‑centric focus.
• Contribute to the creation, curation, and release of open datasets, baseline models, and evaluation protocols for OMAIB benchmarks.
• Collaborate with Principal Investigators, industry partners, and end‑user stakeholders to gather requirements, address technical challenges, and ensure practical, real‑world relevance of outputs.
• Disseminate research outcomes through multiple channels, including software packaging and release, technical documentation, and contributions to academic papers, conference presentations, tutorials, and hackathons.
• As a member of staff, make ethical decisions in your role, embedding the University’s sustainability strategy into your working activities wherever possible.
• Carry out other duties, commensurate with the grade and remit of the post.

• Design AI / machine learning software architecture and prototypes.
• Lead the writing of high‑quality AI‑related papers/reports and the dissemination of AI research outcomes.
• Lead AI‑related training and interactions with collaborators and partners.
• Organise project meetings and supervise junior members of the team.
• Share management responsibilities delegated from the head of the team.

Our diverse…