Electronic Arts

Creative Innovation sits at the intersection of emerging technology, creative craft, and game-making, developing the tools, partnerships, and breakthroughs that help EA's studios create more ambitiously. We innovate shoulder to shoulder with game teams, pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and our work reaches players through the world's most beloved games.

We are looking for a Senior Research Engineer (Applied AI) to join our On-Device Inference program. This person should have machine learning experience and be able to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and real applications in our games. You will work across LLMs, small language models, and other transformer-based architectures. You will be developing datasets, training, fine-tuning, evaluating, and adapting models for game-specific use cases. These models will run directly on player hardware. This is an applied R&D role: you sit at the early stage of technology design, taking research objectives and bringing them to reality. You know the relevant research areas in the field and know how they need to evolve to deliver unforgettable player experiences. You balance innovation, quality, and reliability to deliver AI systems that are performant and ready for real player experiences.

This is a hybrid remote/in-office role (3 days/week at the office) from our Vancouver, BC studio. You will report to the Pillar lead for Emergent Gameplay.

As a Senior Research Engineer on the On-Device Inference program, you will:

• Partner with AI researchers to develop experiments and software based on the latest research.
• Design and implement experiments to evaluate model quality, performance, and player impact, using data-driven insights to guide model iteration.
• Build demos that showcase novel applications of LLMs, STT, TTS, and other transformer-based AI models.
• Participate in the delivery of novel AI technology, from the R&D workbench into products at EA, in partnership with game teams and central technology groups.
• Collaborate with game teams and central technology groups to understand their requirements better and bring expertise in overlapping areas.

We are looking for an open and curious person; someone who gets a kick out of taking new ideas, investigating them, and adapting their application to games.

Required Qualifications:

• A degree in Computer Science, a STEM field, or equivalent practical experience related to game AI.
• 8+ years of experience in ML engineering or related roles, with a track record of taking cutting-edge research and applying it across domains such as LLMs, STT, TTS, or other transformer-based models.
• Experience training, fine-tuning, and adapting frontier AI research for real-world use cases, supported by a willingness to work across multiple model types and research areas.
• Experience turning ideas into functional prototypes or demos that showcase concepts in practice.
• A genuine interest in video games and an understanding of the deployment constraints across consoles, PCs, and mobile devices (memory budgets, thermal limits, cross-platform compatibility).

Desired Qualifications:

• PhD degree in Computer Science or a STEM field.
• Working knowledge of game engines such as Unity, Unreal, Godot, or similar technologies.
• Experience with publications in peer-reviewed conferences or journals.