R&D Engineer

As R&D Engineer — Research Role: Neural Network Architectures for YOLO — you'll design and develop the neural network architectures at the core of how YOLO is built. Your work will directly shape the open-source models used by millions of developers across detection, segmentation, pose, and emerging vision tasks.

You'll operate at the intersection of research and production, turning ideas from papers into performant architectures, rigorous experiments, and production-ready model designs. Working closely with our cross-disciplinary R&D team, you'll help define future releases across the Ultralytics ecosystem and contribute to the technical foundations documented in our docs and guides .

This role is ideal for a hands-on researcher who thrives on first-principles thinking, rapid experimentation, and high ownership. You bring deep architectural intuition, strong PyTorch skills, and the drive to build original models that advance the state of the art.

Research, design, and build novel neural network architectures for next-generation YOLO models.

Develop core components including backbones, necks, heads, attention modules, and efficient building blocks.

Read, reproduce, and extend cutting-edge papers into working model architectures from scratch.

Run rigorous ablation studies and large-scale architecture experiments across standard benchmarks.

Improve accuracy, latency, and scaling through distillation, pruning, and quantization-aware design.

Build training recipes and evaluation pipelines for detection, segmentation, pose, and new vision tasks.

Partner with R&D and engineering teams to turn research ideas into production-ready open-source models.

Contribute to foundational model initiatives that support future YOLO and broader vision systems.

Take ownership of assigned R&D tasks beyond architecture work and solve problems efficiently and correctly.

Published research at venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, or ICLR.

Experience with distributed training, mixed precision, CUDA profiling, or model deployment constraints.

Active open-source presence with architecture-focused repositories and meaningful community adoption.

Familiarity with the Ultralytics Python package , documentation , or community forum .

History of taking original research from prototype to models others actually use.

At Ultralytics, we set bold goals and execute with speed, precision, and teamwork . We're driven by hard work, ambition, and resilience — building fast, learning constantly, and delivering measurable impact.

Take ownership and deliver results with focus and accountability.

Combine deep technical thinking with hands-on execution.

Value excellence, grit, and creativity in equal measure.

See collaboration as the foundation for meaningful progress.

Relentless progress: Constant evolution and improvement.

Strive for excellence: Perseverance and attention to detail.

Actions, not words: Focus on delivering meaningful results.

Act with urgency: Seize fleeting opportunities.

Open access to all: Transparent communication and collaboration.

Learn more in our Ultralytics Handbook and Mission & Values .

Comprehensive guide to our company’s mission, vision, values, and operational practices. This handbook is designed to provide key insights and resources for our (future) team members, collaborators, and community to align with Ultralytics' core principles.

Link: https://handbook.ultralytics.com/

Ultralytics is an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building an inclusive workplace. We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.