2026 Graduate Machine Learning Engineer - Applied AI

Bristol, UK

About us

Graphcore is one of the world’s leading innovators in Artificial Intelligence compute.

It is developing hardware, software and systems infrastructure that will unlock the next generation of AI breakthroughs and power the widespread adoption of AI solutions across every industry.

As part of the SoftBank Group, Graphcore is a member of an elite family of companies responsible for some of the world’s most transformative technologies. Together, they share a bold vision: to enable Artificial Super Intelligence and ensure its benefits are accessible to everyone.

Graphcore’s teams are drawn from diverse backgrounds and bring a broad range of skills and perspectives. A melting pot of AI research specialists, silicon designers, software engineers and systems architects, Graphcore enjoys a culture of continuous learning and constant innovation.

Job Summary

As a Graduate Machine Learning Engineer in the Applied AI team at Graphcore, you will contribute to advancing AI technology by developing and optimising AI models tailored to our specialised hardware. Working closely with the Software development and Research teams, you will play a critical role in identifying opportunities to innovate and differentiate Graphcore’s technology. This role is ideal for someone who loves working hands-on with models, has a strong foundation in ML fundamentals, and wants to push the boundaries of AI performance in real-world systems.

The Team

The Applied AI team’s role is to understand the latest AI models, applications, and software to ensure that Graphcore’s technology works seamlessly with the AI ecosystem. We build reference applications, contribute to key software libraries e.g. optimising kernels for efficiency on our hardware, and collaborate with the Research team to develop and publish novel ideas in domains such as efficient compute, model scaling and distributed training and inference of AI models for different modalities and applications.

Responsibilities and Duties

• Implement state-of-the-art machine learning models and optimise them for performance and accuracy, scaling to 1000s of accelerators.
• Evaluate new software releases, provide feedback to software engineering teams, make necessary code fixes, and conduct code reviews.
• Benchmark models and key model components to identify performance bottlenecks and improve model efficiency.
• Design and conduct experiments on novel AI methods, analyse and report results clearly.
• Collaborate with Research, Software, and Product teams to define, build, and test Graphcore’s next generation of AI hardware.
• Stay current with AI research and actively engage with the broader AI and open-source community.

Candidate Profile

• Bachelor’s/Master's degree in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Maths, Data Science, or related field.
• Proficiency in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch/JAX and strong software development skills.
• Solid understanding of deep learning fundamentals — architectures, optimisation, evaluation, and scaling.
• Capable of designing, executing and reporting from ML experiments.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving, occasionally ambiguous environment.
• Enjoy cross-functional work collaborating with other teams.

Experience in one or more of:

• Development of deep learning models including large generative models for language, vision and other modalities;
• Distributed training of large-scale ML models.
• Experience writing high performance C++/Triton/CUDA kernels.
• Contributions to open-source projects or published research.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms and ML infrastructure.
• Enthusiasm for presenting, publishing, or engaging in the AI community.

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working, a generous annual leave policy, private medical insurance and health cash plan, a dental plan, pension (matched up to 5%), life assurance and income protection. We have a generous parental leave policy and an employee assistance programme (which includes health, mental wellbeing, and bereavement support). We offer a range of healthy food and snacks at our central Bristol office and have our own barista bar! We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we’re committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments.

UK Demographic Data

We take pride in our commitment to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace. As part of our recruitment process, we ask for confidential diversity data from all applicants. This data will be anonymised so that no personal identification information will be collected, and is retained for statistical purposes only and is not attached to your application. Your responses to the following three questions will remain confidential and will not impact or be used in any way in regards to your application. We are only using this data to improve our hiring process to be inclusive of all diversity backgrounds.

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