R&D Engineer

About the role

About Ultralytics:

At Ultralytics https://ultralytics.com/, we commit to relentless innovation in the AI space and seek team members https://www.ultralytics.com/about who resonate with our ambition to produce the world's best YOLO AI models https://ultralytics.com/yolo. If you're obsessed with AI, eager to make an impact on the world, and thrive in dynamic, high-intensity environments, we invite you to apply for a position on our team.

⚡ WHO WE ARE

At Ultralytics https://www.ultralytics.com/, we're on a mission to simplify AI for everyone. As the creators of the world's leading open-source YOLO models https://docs.ultralytics.com/models/ and the popular Ultralytics GitHub repository https://github.com/ultralytics, we empower millions of developers, researchers, and companies worldwide to build state-of-the-art computer vision applications.

Following our $30M Series A round https://www.ultralytics.com/news/ultralytics-raises-30m-series-a, we're expanding rapidly across our global hubs in London, Madrid, and Shenzhen. This is an opportunity to join a fast-scaling, high-performance team that's redefining the future of vision AI — where ambition meets impact, and ideas become reality.

We move fast. We build boldly. We execute with purpose. And we do it together.

💼 ABOUT THE ROLE

As an R&D Engineer focused on neural network architectures for YOLO, you'll design and develop the neural network architectures at the core of how YOLO https://docs.ultralytics.com/models/ is built. Your work will directly shape the open-source models used by millions of developers across detection, segmentation, pose, and emerging vision tasks.

You'll operate at the intersection of research and production, turning ideas from papers into performant architectures, rigorous experiments, and production-ready model designs. Working closely with our cross-disciplinary R&D team, you'll help define future releases across the Ultralytics ecosystem https://www.ultralytics.com/ and contribute to the technical foundations documented in our docs https://docs.ultralytics.com/ and guides https://docs.ultralytics.com/guides/.

This role is ideal for a hands-on researcher who thrives on first-principles thinking, rapid experimentation, and high ownership. You bring deep architectural intuition, strong PyTorch skills, and the drive to build original models that advance the state of the art.

🚀 WHAT YOU'LL DO

RESEARCH & ARCHITECTURE DESIGN

- Research, design, and build novel neural network architectures for next-generation YOLO models.

- Develop core components including backbones, necks, heads, attention modules, and efficient building blocks.

- Read, reproduce, and extend cutting-edge papers into working model architectures from scratch.

EXPERIMENTATION & OPTIMIZATION

- Run rigorous ablation studies and large-scale architecture experiments across standard benchmarks.

- Improve accuracy, latency, and scaling through distillation, pruning, and quantization-aware design.