12 month Fixed-Term Contract. Ideal Start date: Feb/March 2024

At Google DeepMind, we value diversity of experience, knowledge, backgrounds and perspectives and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.

We’re keen to hire a Games Systems Engineer to join our Worlds team on a 12 month fixed term contract, leveraging video games technology for advanced AI agent research!

London, UK

Fixed Term Contract - 12 months

Ideal Start Date: Feb/March 2024

At Google DeepMind, we value diversity of experience, knowledge, backgrounds and perspectives and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.

We’re keen to hire a Games Systems Engineer to join our Worlds team on a 12 month fixed term contract, leveraging video games technology for advanced AI agent research!

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. 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.

The Worlds team provides Google DeepMind Researchers with the best training and testing environments possible. These range from bespoke mini-games aimed at answering specific research questions, to expansive first-person environments using modern game engines, to the use of well-known AAA game titles. The team is important in helping steer Google DeepMind’s research forward.

​We design and implement our learning environments carefully as it’s likely we’ll live with them for many years to come, so we apply thoughtfulness to everything we do. We take design and implementation equally seriously to deliver high quality environments, so that research experiments are reproducible and repeatable. You’ll join a close-knit team of accomplished individuals who openly share ideas with one another. Projects we’ve worked on include AlphaGo, AlphaStar, DM Lab, and DQN on Atari as well as contributions to countless publications.

You’ll develop and support our underlying infrastructure to accelerate games creation whilst helping to ensure optimum performance. All games are wrapped with a common environment API so agents can switch between them without interface changes. For Research to proceed as quickly as possible our training environments are designed to run within novel and varied timing constraints, often much faster than real time, and at massive scale across global infrastructure. You will work collaboratively within the team and beyond to help build, maintain and optimise our environments.

No machine learning experience is required for this role!

Key responsibilities for this role may include:

• Developing and improving our infrastructure for packaging and deploying games for use with agent training and evaluation.
• Collaborating closely with research engineers and scientists to help apply our games technology to cutting-edge areas of agent research.
• Creating tools to decrease friction with human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Working with our team of artists to develop UX tooling for efficient workflows.
• Developing and maintaining our large-scale asset processing and dataset technologies.
• Working with scientists and game designers to develop bespoke new simulation environments.

You are a collaborative software engineer with a real passion for software creation and problem solving with an enthusiastic, can-do attitude to overcoming technical challenges. You’ll need a strong foundation in software engineering within a games setting and enjoy working on a wide range of challenging problems within a mission-driven team.

In order to set you up for success as a Software Engineer at Google DeepMind,  we look for the following skills and experience:

• Proven C++ or Python programming experience
• Software design, development and testing
• Experience with one of the following:
  • Tools development
  • Game engines such as Unity or Unreal
  • Build systems and asset pipelines
  • Physics programming
  • Performance optimisation
  • Concurrent or distributed systems architecture

In addition, the following would be an advantage: 

• Docker (or similar virtualisation) experience
• WebRTC
• Video codecs
• Rendering experience
• Basic understanding of maths and statistics