Research Engineer, Continual Learning

At Google DeepMind, we value diversity of experience, knowledge, backgrounds and perspectives and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Snapshot

Our research team at Google DeepMind focuses on pushing the boundaries of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence theory & practice in order to contribute to our mission.  Research Engineers at Google DeepMind lead our efforts in developing scalable infrastructure to support the development and conduct research experiments towards the end goal of solving and building Artificial General Intelligence. Research Engineers work closely with other engineers and scientists to advance the field producing groundbreaking research artifacts.

The Continual Learning Team, led by Marc’Aurelio Ranzato, seeks to build a modular large-scale continual learning system that is more scalable, more robust, more efficient at integrating new information, and overall more collaborative. We believe that intelligence is not just about how well a system can learn a new task, but also how few resources it uses, and how quickly it can adapt to changes. A key ingredient towards this goal is modularity, which enables more decoupled and robust training, model extensibility and efficiency via sparse activations of modules.

Our team’s approach is focused and creative, with a highly supportive and collaborative culture. Past projects that current team members contributed to include DiPaco, DiLoCo, and the Nevis benchmark.

About Us

Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority.

At Google DeepMind we've built a unique culture and work environment where long-term ambitious research can flourish. Our special interdisciplinary team combines the best techniques from deep learning, reinforcement learning and systems neuroscience to build general-purpose learning algorithms. We have already made a number of high profile breakthroughs towards building artificial general intelligence and we have all the ingredients in place to make further significant progress over the coming year.

The Role

Research Engineers work on a diverse and stimulating range of projects including: developing algorithms, infrastructures and prototype applications, providing software design and programming support to research projects, along with architecting and implementing software libraries. Our Research Engineers are pivotal to the development and ongoing improvement of our research through the computational implementation of our latest algorithmic advancements. 

Research Engineers make many different vital contributions to our engineering infrastructure and research programme. Typical work will include:

• Design, implement, integrate, scale up and evaluate models, and training algorithms for distributed large-scale continual learning.
• Analyze and optimize system performance to enable distributed training of larger scale models. 
• Digest and understand complex research papers, theory and thinking, with an ability to write algorithms from scratch. This role is pivotal in training, iterating and improving the performance of our large scale models.
• Own, report and present research findings and engineering developments clearly and efficiently both internally and externally, verbally and in writing.
• Engage actively in team collaborations to meet research goals. 
• Contribute to defining roadmaps for the team and own critical components, particularly those pertaining to system infrastructure and software libraries.
• Write high quality code to be shared within a research group or more broadly.

About You

In order to set you up for success as a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind,  we look for the following skills and experience:

• MSc/MEng in a technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• Proven experience, either in industry or a research lab, working on complex ML problems and engineering workflows .
• Strong knowledge and experience of Python and/or C .
• Experience using machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, JAX or Pytorch.
• Knowledge of basic machine learning methodology and algorithms.
• Experience with the workflow of a machine learning project, from idea prototyping to analysis and debugging.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, HPC, CUDA programming, file systems.
• Experience working with accelerators like GPUs and TPUs.
• Passionate about AI.

In addition, the following would be an advantage: 

• PhD in an area related to machine learning. 
• Experience with multi-threaded design and parallel/distributed computing.

What we offer

At Google DeepMind, we want employees and their families to live happier and healthier lives, both in and out of work, and our benefits reflect that. Some select benefits we offer: enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption, and shared parental leave, private medical and dental insurance for yourself and any dependents, and flexible working options. We strive to continually improve our working environment, and provide you with excellent facilities such as healthy food, an on-site gym, faith rooms, terraces etc.

We are also open to relocating candidates to New York, NY and offer a bespoke service and immigration support to make it as easy as possible (depending on eligibility).

The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $133,000 - $203,000 bonus equity benefits. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your targeted location during the hiring process.

Application deadline: 12pm PST Tuesday 4th June 2024 

Note: In the event your application is successful and an offer of employment is made to you, any offer of employment will be conditional on the results of a background check, performed by a third party acting on our behalf. For more information on how we handle your data, please see our Applicant and Candidate Privacy Policy.