Research Engineer Internship London 2024

Hadean is an award-winning, record-breaking technology enabler. Our transformational software is changing the ways we plan, build, learn, work and live.

Through immersive virtual systems, unprecedented connectivity and near unlimited scalability we empower our partners to obtain critical, data-driven insights that enhance operational performance and increase their capabilities to drive productivity in ways that were not possible before.

We are bold in our approach and aren't afraid to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Hadean’s solutions have helped organisations including Microsoft, The British Army, Minecraft, The MoD, Sony, the Francis Crick Institute and more to achieve groundbreaking performances that have revolutionised their operations.

Hadean’s technologies include our distributed cloud computing platform, which is capable of bringing the power of many cloud computers to bear on single problems. We are able to leverage this for creating vast virtual worlds (Hadean Simulate) in which large numbers of individuals can interact (Hadean Connect).

We help people make better decisions via scenario analysis (Hadean Orchestrate). We enhance how people interact with one another in virtual spaces, including gaming and virtual training.

The team

Hadean's Innovation Team is tasked with discovering the next big applications of our distributed cloud computing technology, ensuring Hadean has the cutting-edge technological offerings required to stay ahead of the market.

As a deep-tech scaleup, research engineering is critical to building demonstrators within the Innovation team. We work at the coal-face of hard technological and business problems, seeking out emergent challenges and - crucially - imagining business models which mean that our innovations provide value to businesses, customers, and Hadean.

We are a small, agile team who focus on ideating, refining and validating ideas in order to then build powerful prototypes. Products such as Hadean Orchestrate have their origins in our team. Our culture is critical to what we do: the team is close-knit whilst open and communicative, trust is important, and we thrive on sharing ideas and challenging one another. Developing our people to be the best they can be is core to what we do, and this role would be no exception.

The role

We are currently seeking talented research engineer interns who would be interested in developing a project from scratch - with support from our innovation experts - learning how to operate at the cutting edge of a tech startup.

Research engineering means working on novel things that there may not be a known solution to, and brings variety and flexibility to own a project. Specifically, we want to test prototypes with deep applications in areas such as generative AI, predictive AI, data assimilation and processing, virtual worlds, distributed compute, security or cloud computing.

You must be a clear thinker, capable of analysing a new idea and distilling its core elements, and setting it into place with your existing knowledge. You should be comfortable discussing, explaining, and iterating on your ideas in depth with the Innovation Team, and with other stakeholders. You should enjoy working on a wide range of ideas, picking up new concepts, and thinking about technical solution details before writing a line of code.

Key responsibilities

You will be driving and owning small projects, so high autonomy and dedication is a must. Daily support from the team will be available. The project could be written in Rust, C++, Python, or a language of your choice (if you can convince us it is the right one for solving the problem!). Working together with our technology and business case experts, you will gain insight into good practices, as well as software engineering design and structure.

As part of the team, you will perform research and evaluation of key technologies supporting business models and concepts, perform prototype development in order to ascertain technical feasibility of potential products, and you will create demonstration prototypes in support of proving their conceptual desirability. Your role in the team is to:

• Engineering for product-market fit tests: provide the technical implementations required for proving out the business cases for potential solutions. This will involve engineering rapid (throwaway) prototypes for potential customers. These prototypes will only ever require the minimal viable feature set required to answer the question at hand. Speed of execution is more important than correctness here so you will always choose mock-ups over full builds and integrate/borrow from other tools where possible.
• Work on a potentially varied set of projects, as the tests we must perform evolve.
• Be willing to work across all possible verticals which may provide value to Hadean.
• Be willing to learn aspects of new technologies for the purpose of evaluation or prototyping
• Actively participate in the team’s ongoing curation and prioritisation of novel business case hypotheses from a technical perspective, and in designing tests against those hypotheses.
  • Assist technical handover of proven concepts to other teams in the company, providing the support they need to start building, then be ready to move on to the next thing.
  • Explain and discuss current projects to other engineers within the company as necessary, in order to draw on their expertise. Work alongside these engineers when they are brought into Innovation projects.

Skills, nowledge and expertise

• A strong academic background, specialised in computer science, mathematics, data science, AI, or a closely related technical field.
• Analytical, thorough, and able to construct convincing arguments and chains of reasoning.
• You have knowledge of programming - for example in C/C++, Rust, Python, although other languages may be considered, too.
• Willingness to work collaboratively in a creative cross-functional product discovery team that includes business and product members.
• Execution focused: can act fast and decisively to get things done, carrying projects forward along sensible paths as assessed by you (with support from the team as you learn to do this), using judgement to make thoughtful and considered tradeoffs with a bias towards action
• Systematic but not rigid - will ensure we have the data to move ideas forward, but not a perfectionist
• Communication - can articulate complex and highly technical ideas clearly
• Strong opinions, weakly held - passion is important, but the humility to doubt and challenge ourselves is the key to success here.

Above all, a willingness to rise to challenges, stretch yourself, and grow technically and professionally in a fast-paced but supportive environment.

Benefits

We make Hadean an awesome place to work with competitive benefits:

• The option to work from home (Weds/Thurs/Fri) or from our fantastic office in Shoreditch, London (as many days as you like!)
• Flexible working
• 3 extra days off at Christmas (on top of our standard 25)
• L&D budget
• Quarterly business reviews with team dinners and events (including global virtual social events)
• Regularly scheduled socials
• Quarterly awards with cash prizes

A place for everyone

We believe diversity drives innovation and for that reason we strongly encourage those from all backgrounds to apply for roles at Hadean. We are an equal opportunity employer and aim to build a workforce that is truly representative of the communities in which we operate and our clients.

If you need reasonable adjustments at any point in the application or interview process, please speak with the People team who will be happy to support you. If you have a preferred pronoun, please feel free to highlight this during the process (e.g. she/her, he/him, they/them, etc.).