Research Scientist, Reinforcement Learning, DeepMind

DeepMind - London, UK

• PhD in Machine Learning, or equivalent practical experience.
• 2 years of experience implementing algorithms within research codebases.
• Experience conducting research in reinforcement learning, including contributions to peer reviewed publications.
• Experience designing and executing end to end experiments, including setup, analysis, and interpretation.

• Experience with advanced reinforcement learning topics, such as RL for sequence models, post training, preference based learning, or agentic systems.
• Familiarity with modern research stacks (e.g., JAX/Flax or PyTorch) and experience scaling experiments.
• Strong experimental judgment, including selecting appropriate baselines and designing insightful ablations.
• Comfort with scaling methodologies, evaluation techniques, and diagnosing complex failure modes.
• High agency and drive to push projects forward, prioritize effectively, and take initiative.
• Excellent communication skills, with a focus on clear and honest presentation of research results.

At DeepMind's Reinforcement Learning (RL) team we address large scale research issues in reinforcement learning. We design, refine, and scale RL algorithms and deliver meaningful scientific or product impact. Our work builds on a legacy of achievements such as DQN, AlphaGo, Rainbow, AlphaZero, MuZero, AlphaStar, AlphaProof, and Gemini.

Artificial intelligence will be one of humanity's most transformative inventions. At DeepMind, we are a pioneering AI lab with exceptional interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing AI development to solve complex global challenges and accelerate high quality product innovation for billions of users. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, ensuring safety and ethics are always our highest priority.

We are pushing the boundaries across multiple domains. Our global teams offer diverse learning opportunities and varied career pathways for those driven to achieve exceptional results through collective effort.

As a Research Scientist, you will set up large scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly, managing deadlines and deliverables while applying the latest theories to develop new and improved products, processes, or technologies. You will also actively contribute to the wider research community by sharing and publishing your findings, with ideas inspired by internal projects as well as from collaborations with research programs at partner universities and technical institutes worldwide.

• Propose and pursue novel research directions by formulating and testing hypotheses.
• Implement algorithmic ideas and conduct end to end experiments, analyzing results and iterating on findings.
• Design evaluations and ablations to answer key questions and drive research decisions.
• Build and improve infrastructure to enable research at scale.
• Communicate research findings through write ups, presentations, and publications, while fostering a culture of high standards and constructive feedback.

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