Doctoral Researcher

About the Role

The Post-doctoral Researcher role is a 12 to 24-month fixed-term contract designed to explore challenging problems for pushing frontiers of AI, while collaborating with DeepMind scientists and engineers. The AQUA team at DeepMind India works at the frontier of AI agents, focusing on autonomous self-improvement, reinforcement learning, and the safety and alignment of agents.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with research mentors to formulate research projects or novel applications of machine learning aligned with the team's mission. Conduct research and publish high quality work.
• Design and execute large-scale experiments, writing high-quality, reusable code, and contributing to a production-ready system using frameworks such as JAX. Learn and understand research in machine learning algorithms.
• Understand how to use research to drive design decisions.
• Design and conduct user studies (e.g., interviews, surveys, controlled experiments, and field deployments) to understand how people interact with, oversee, and provide feedback to AI agents.
• Prototype novel interfaces and interaction techniques that help people steer, supervise, and collaborate with increasingly autonomous agents.
• Develop human-centered evaluation methods and metrics for the helpfulness, trustworthiness, safety, and alignment of agents.
• Translate insights from human studies into improvements in how agents learn from human feedback and improve themselves (e.g., reward modeling, preference elicitation, and human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning).

Requirements & Tech Stack

• PhD degree in a STEM field (e.g., Computer Science, Mathematics, or Statistics) or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with one or more general purpose programming languages: Python, C/C++, or Java, etc. and training deep learning models in frameworks such as JAX, TensorFlow, or PyTorch.
• Research experience in machine learning or AI techniques (e.g., open source project(s), campus lab experience, research internship(s), or publication(s)).
• One or more scientific publication submission(s) in AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ICLR).

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD and Master’s degree in a STEM field (e.g. Computer Science, Mathematics, or Statistics) or equivalent practical experience.
• Hands-on experience with one or more general purpose programming languages: Python, C/C++, or Java, etc and training deep learning models in frameworks such as JAX, TensorFlow, or PyTorch.
• Extensive research experience in machine learning or AI techniques (e.g. open source project(s), campus lab experience, research internship(s), or publication(s)).
• Ability to work and collaborate across multiple teams and work with ambiguity.
• A strong publication record in top-tier conferences/journals.

Application Requirements

• Updated CV or resume (PDF preferred).
• Current unofficial or official transcript in English (PDF preferred).
• Statement of purpose (no more than 500 words), detailing reasons for your interest in the Post-doctoral Researcher role.
• Ensure graduation date (in MM/YY) is listed on the CV/resume.