Founding AI Research Engineer
Catapult
Software Engineering, Data Science
Posted on Jul 24, 2025
Founding AI Research Engineer
At Catapult, we're building AI systems that securely understand you, your work, and its full context. We call this Contextual Intelligence—the essential layer needed to build truly useful, reliable, and autonomous AI.
With this, Catapult will help you:
Find anything, from specific details to insights buried in your emails, documents, and apps
Know everything, by using AI reasoning across your data to answer complex questions
Autocomplete work, by suggesting and performing actions across your apps and device
We're solving foundational problems that Apple Intelligence, Gemini, and others haven't cracked yet. Our approach combines building cutting-edge systems for ingesting and understanding data with our powerful multi-stage reasoning models.
Our early results are promising, we're well-funded, and we're building a team of brilliant minds—sharp problem solvers, researchers, and engineers who thrive on tackling novel challenges in a dynamic, highly technical environment.
The role
The founding AI research engineer must be a brilliant problem solver, researcher, and engineer — and will be instrumental in shaping the scientific and research AI direction for Catapult. The work of this role focuses our retrieval and knowledge-base systems, our reasoning models, models for reasoning about information live on screen and from other applications, and more. In each case, the founding AI research engineer will be working end-to-end on each of these projects, taking them from inception all the way to product.
The ideal candidate must not just have strong scientific and technical abilities, but the ability to learn quickly and work in a very fast-moving environment.
You’ll love this role if you enjoy…
Identifying and solving very challenging technical and research-level problems
Building products end-to-end (from hypothesis and experimentation all the way to user-facing application)
Bringing expertise on and keeping abreast of current research and developments in NLP, vision, and more
Helping identify and tackle technical challenges that may emerge across the product
Pushing beyond your comfort zone and maximise your potential
Requirements and experience
5+ years of experience working on similar projects
A strong track record of solving similar problems in either an academic or industrial setting
A strong track record displaying the ability to manage both scientific (e.g. forming and testing hypotheses) and engineering workflows (e.g. building robust and scalable products, etc.)
The ability to read current research in the field (NLP/AI) and the ability to understand, implement, and ideally build upon those ideas.
Experience working with NLP/LLMs or other AI/ML
Strong programming skills (especially in Python)
Experience working with cloud infrastructure providers and database technologies (e.g. SQL/no-SQL)
Ability to self-organise and work independently
Based in, or willing to relocate to London (we are open to sponsoring visas)
Nice to haves
Deep ML/CS/statistics/physics/mathematics background or experience (research degrees or industrial research experience is ideal)
Some experience with C++/Rust
Experience working on open-source projects, working on an interesting side project, or contributing to Stack Exchange (or similar)
What we offer
Shape the future of Contextual Intelligence, working closely with our co-founders
Competitive salary and equity package
Private healthcare, wellbeing and lunch allowances
All the equipment you need to be and feel your best
We sponsor work visas so that you can come build with us in person in London
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