Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts creates next-level entertainment experiences that inspire players and fans around the world. Here, everyone is part of the story. Part of a community that connects across the globe. A place where creativity thrives, new perspectives are invited, and ideas matter. A team where everyone makes play happen.

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 Research Developer (Applied AI) to join our On-Device Inference program. This person should have machine learning experience and be able to help 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, contributing to dataset development, 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 work alongside senior researchers and developers at the early stage of technology design, helping take research objectives and bring them to reality. You stay current on relevant research areas in the field and are eager to explore how they can 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 Research Developer on the On-Device Inference program, you will:

• Partner with AI researchers and senior developers 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.
• Contribute to 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 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.
• 5+ years of experience in ML engineering or related roles, with experience applying research across domains such as LLMs, STT, TTS, or other transformer-based models.
• Experience training, fine-tuning, and adapting AI models 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

• Master's or 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.

• British Columbia (depending on location e.g. Vancouver vs. Victoria)
  • $141,400 - $204,400 CAD

For Canada, we offer a package of benefits including vacation (3 weeks per year to start), 10 days per year of sick time, paid top-up to EI/QPIP benefits up to 100% of base salary when you welcome a new child (12 weeks for maternity, and 4 weeks for parental/adoption leave), extended health/dental/vision coverage, life insurance, disability insurance, retirement plan to regular full-time employees. Certain roles may also be eligible for bonus and equity.