Research Engineer, Human Understanding

About the role

<h2>Snapshot</h2> <p>We are seeking a highly motivated Research Engineer (L5) with a strong background in multi-modal modelling for humans and a focus on speech & audio/visual to join the effort within Google DeepMind's Frontier AI unit. This role is pivotal in developing foundational multimodal AI capabilities to understand, generate, and protect human likeness. As a key contributor, you will design and implement cutting-edge models and frameworks, pushing the boundaries of AI to enable foundational capabilities for human-centric understanding and generation. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to impactful research and advance Google DeepMind's mission towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).</p> <h2>About us</h2> <p>Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence and ultimately achieve Artificial General Intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority.</p> <p>The effort is a part of Google DeepMind's Frontier AI unit. The team aims to build holistic representation encompassing a full spectrum of human understanding. We develop systems to provide perception skills critical for person-centric applications, which is crucial for enabling AI to interact naturally & seamlessly, depict humans accurately &  responsibly in generative AI, and build trustworthy & resilient systems that can detect and prevent misuse like deepfakes and impersonation.</p> <h2>The role</h2> <p>You will drive outcomes for critical technical components aimed at advancing our capabilities in multimodal human understanding. You will play a critical role in developing and deploying models that can provide accurate human understanding across multiple modalities (e.g., visual appearance, voice, dynamics, etc), while also building robust defenses against sophisticated AI-driven manipulation and impersonation.</p> <p>This role involves tackling complex, ambiguous problems with no obvious "best" solution, requiring independent judgment and a proactive approach to exploring multiple technical avenues. You will be instrumental in shaping the technical direction for core components of the effort. Your contribution will lead to key breakthrough and impactful landings within GDM and across Google products, ensuring our technologies are both groundbreaking and responsibly deployed.</p> <h3>Key responsibilities</h3> <ul> <li>Advance multimodal human representations & understanding : Research and implement novel models and other multimodal techniques for a more holistic understanding of humans across visual, audio, and textual data.</li> <li>Conduct applied research: Conduct experimental research cycles from hypothesis to deployment.</li> <li>Drive technical projects: Take ownership of substantial technical projects within the effort, from ideation and design to implementation and evaluation, often involving cross-functional collaboration.</li> <li>Contribute to Infrastructure: Inform and contribute to the development of scalable and efficient research infrastructure for multimodal human understanding models and datasets.</li> <li>Design and execute strategies for tuning and adapting VLMs and other foundation models for specific tasks</li> </ul> <h3>About you</h3> <p>In order to set you up for success as a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind, we look for the following skills and experience:</p> <p><strong>Requirements:</strong><