AI Engineer (KTP Associate)

KTP

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) are a unique UK-wide activity that help businesses to improve their competitiveness and productivity by making better use of the knowledge, technology and skills within universities, colleges and research organisations. Further information is available at: www.ktponline.org.uk

THE PROJECT 

The University of Essex in partnership with Eckersley O’Callaghan offers an exciting opportunity to a graduate with the relevant skills and knowledge to build and integrate a bespoke multi-modal AI tool for the automation of structural and façade engineering design workflows, based on a catalogue of previous project data.

This post is fixed term for 32 months and is based at Eckersley O’Callaghan’s offices in London.

DUTIES OF THE POST

The duties of the post will include: 

• Identify business requirements for the AI-powered tool approaches suitable for Eckersley O’Callaghan Ltd and the underlying project.
• Create a basic pipeline that queries an AI model in a black-box setting to retrieve the most relevant designs based on user input.
• Assess Eckersley O’Callaghan’s current IT, Data Infrastructure, and software solutions, and clearly understand further functionality, features, automations and capabilities needed.
• Form a Working Group to ensure exploitation occurs at the most appropriate time and to steer the project commercially.
• Explore the already existing data structures, databases, and Reporting and Analytics within the company, relate them to the project and define the initial system architecture.
• Build a foundational dataset for developing and testing the AI-powered tool.
• Develop the user interface (UI) or frontend for the AI-powered tool that provides an intuitive and seamless experience for users.
• Implement RAG pipeline for retrieval of relevant documents and generation of design recommendations.
• User testing and validation of the AI-powered tool.
• Write the testing and evaluation report.
• Write research papers on the developed AI-powered tool for submission to conferences and journals.

These duties are a guide to the work that the post holder will initially be required to undertake. They may be changed from time to time to meet changing circumstances.

KEY REQUIREMENTS

• PhD or Masters in computer science, AI, or relevant discipline with a publication track record.
• Advanced skills in a relevant programming language (Java/Python/C#).
• Version control of best practice, annotation of code.
• Knowledge and experience of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
• Knowledge of data architecture, data cleansing and data lakes that enable training AI models with proprietary legacy databases.
• Experience or knowledge in developing and deploying to production AI solutions based on open source LLMs, VLMs and RAG models, utilising proprietary knowledge base.
• User Interface development.
• Advanced skills in a relevant programming language (Java/Python/C#).
• Communicating complex technical concepts to a range of audiences.
• Excellent written and spoken English.
• Ability to collaborate with individuals with different abilities and skills, building relationships.
• Well organised, ability to strategically plan work packages to meet milestones.
• Ability to work independently.

Please use the 'Apply' button to read further information about this role including the full job description and person specification which outlines the full duties, skills, qualifications and experience needed for this role. You will also find details of how to make your application here.

Our website http://www.essex.ac.uk contains more information about the University of Essex. If you have a disability and would like information in a different format, please email resourcing@essex.ac.uk.

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