Research Engineer (Foundation Model)

About Native

Native is a VC backed AI startup building the world’s most accurate AI for databases reasoning. This is hard .

This is an unsolved problem that once solved will change how every enterprise operates.

We recently published our results, achieving rank 1 on the industry standard benchmark.

Our research team is based in London.

Everyone has high agency, obsessed with the problem we are solving, embraces the intensity of a 6-day week and has the ambition to build something world changing.

We are a exceptional research engineers and scientists taking a novel approach to accurate database reasoning.

About the role

This is a founding research engineer role, with the opportunity to set the research agenda and shape the architecture from day one.

• Drive foundational research and engineering for reasoning over complex tabular data
• Design, implement, and iterate on new encoders (including graph transformers) for complex heterogeneous data
• Develop creative and impactful self-supervised learning objectives and translate them into production-ready systems
• Scale novel foundation models across huge datasets
• Build, optimize, and maintain scalable training and evaluation pipelines
• Fine-tune foundation model embeddings into high-value downstream tasks
• Work hands-on across the full stack, from research ideas to deployed systems
• Guide and mentor an exceptional team of research engineers

Required experience

• Proven ability to lead or significantly contribute to teams tackling hard research-engineering problems
• MSc / PhD in Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, or a related field
• Strong hands-on experience building, training, and scaling foundation models with modern ML tooling (PyTorch, Ray, JAX)
• Strong background in graph neural networks and transformer architectures
• Demonstrated ability to turn research ideas into robust, scalable implementations
• Comfortable owning whatever needs doing, from research prototypes to infrastructure
• Experience optimizing large-scale training runs on GPU clusters

Why join us

This is a rare chance to join a founding team operating at the frontier of AI, with the resources to win.

• Impact: You will push the frontier of foundation models for an under-explored, massively valuable domain.
• Team: We are a small, collaborative, world-class research team based in central London.
• Founding level equity + competitive salary: We want you to share in the upside of what we are building. As part of the founding team, you will receive meaningful ownership alongside a salary that allows you to focus on building something great.
• Direction: Chance to shape the direction of a new class of foundation model from day one.

Culture

• At Native, we look for people with exceptional research and engineering ability, who want to win.
• Everyone loves building and is ambitious enough to want to change how the world operates for the better.
• We run towards hard problems.
• We are creative problem solvers, who keep going until we find the underlying principle of the problem, and build to solve that.
• If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, are intrinsically motivated and want to have a huge impact, we are a great fit.