AI Research Engineer
Molten Ventures (formerly Draper Esprit) is a European venture capital firm that has spent twenty years backing founders and innovators driving Europe's technology transformation. It invests capital alongside experience, energy, and partnership to help visionary technology companies scale, serving high-growth startups and scale-ups across Europe.
About Molten Ventures
Molten Ventures is a publicly listed venture capital firm focused on backing visionary founders building Europe's technology future. Beyond providing capital, the firm offers portfolio companies experience, energy, and partnership to help them scale faster and go further. Its portfolio includes companies that have collectively reached more than 50 million customers, crossed the $200m ARR mark, sold more than 7 million devices, and achieved notable public market outcomes including IPOs at market caps of £1bn and nearly £9bn. The firm operates seed funds, evaluates new investment opportunities and pitch decks from founders, maintains an investor portal for its shareholders, and publishes sustainability reporting covering responsible investment and portfolio engagement practices.
Skills
About the Role
You will contribute to the advancement of AI research, investigating new ideas that push the limits on important AI/ML problems. You'll combine strong machine learning experience with practical engineering skills to deliver impactful AI research, working across topics such as efficient training and inference, world models, life sciences, and reinforcement learning. You'll work closely with researchers to generate ideas and translate them into scalable implementations, contributing to publications and projects that help steer the future of AI hardware.
Requirements
- Master's, PhD or equivalent experience in a technical discipline (e.g., Maths, Statistics, Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry).
- Python programming in a modern deep learning framework, e.g. PyTorch or JAX.
- Familiar with deep learning fundamentals: models, optimisation, evaluation and scaling.
- Capable of designing, executing and reporting from ML experiments.
- Lower-level programming for hardware efficiency, e.g. C++/CUDA/Triton.
- Practical familiarity with hardware capabilities for deep learning – threads, caches, vector & matrix engines, data dependencies, bus widths and throttling.
- Practical familiarity with software stacks for deep learning – compilation, kernel fusion, XLA/ATen ops, streams, and asynchronous execution.
- Mathematics skills to support the above: calculus, probability theory and linear algebra.
- Experience submitting papers to international scientific conferences or workshops.
Responsibilities
- Generate AI/ML ideas, design experiments, implement them and evaluate results.
- Prepare, submit and present your work to AI conferences and workshops.
- Provide technical insight to internal teams by designing experiments and delivering clear, actionable reports.
- Collaborate with researchers, silicon and software engineers to help define, build and test Graphcore's next generation of AI hardware.
Benefits
- Flexible working
- Generous annual leave policy
- Private medical insurance and health cash plan
- Dental plan
- Pension matched up to 5%
- Life assurance
- Income protection
- Generous parental leave policy
- Employee assistance programme
- Healthy food and snacks at central Bristol office
- Barista bar