Research Specialist – AI Systems

Overview

In this role you will advance scalable, distributed AI systems within BT’s sovereign AI initiative. You’ll work in the Intelligent Service Operations team to design and test AI infrastructure that works across models, inference, Kubernetes, GPUs and networks. You will benchmark performance, collaborate with industry partners, and translate research ideas into deployable systems. The position offers exposure to cutting-edge AI infrastructure and real-world deployment at scale in a UK-wide, hybrid setting.

Pay / Benefits

• 10% on target annual bonus
• online private GP 24/7
• 2 weeks paid carers leave
• 18 weeks full pay maternity/paternity/adoption leave
• BT product discounts
• pension scheme – 5% employee + 10% company

Responsibilities

• Research and develop scalable distributed AI techniques
• Design, build and evaluate AI infrastructure prototypes
• Work across models, inference, Kubernetes, GPUs, and distributed systems
• Benchmark latency, throughput, scalability, and resource usage
• Investigate and evaluate emerging AI and infrastructure technologies
• Collaborate with researchers, engineers and industry partners to operationalize research
• Communicate work via technical reports, demos, publications and events

Key requirements

• Practical ML or LLM systems experience
• Strong Python development and Linux proficiency
• Knowledge of Kubernetes, containers, cloud-native infrastructure
• Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (scalability, latency, throughput)
• Experience designing experiments, benchmarking, and performance analysis

• Collaborative mindset
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly
• Problem-solving and analytical thinking
• Machine learning/LLM systems
• Python
• Linux

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