My experience as a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind

Many people have asked what it's like to be a Research Engineer (RE) at Google DeepMind. In this post, I'll share my experience, breaking it down into three parts: a typical day, the anatomy of a project, and how REs and Research Scientists (RS) work together.

My team is split between Bay Area, New York and London, so my day is structured to maximize collaboration across time zones.

• 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM: I start my day by catching up on emails and messages, aiming to unblock my colleagues in London before their day ends. This is followed by meetings during our "golden hour" of overlap, where we sync up on progress and plan next steps.

• 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM: After meetings, I dive into focused project work. Depending on the project phase, this could be anything from:

  • Analyzing results from overnight model training experiments.

  • Developing new evaluation metrics or datasets.

  • Investigating model predictions to find areas for improvement.

  • Writing design documents for new systems.

  • Reviewing code from my teammates.

• 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM: I usually take a break, bike to the office, and have lunch.

• 1:15 PM - 6:00 PM: My afternoon is a mix of collaboration and deep work. I start by reviewing code and responding to messages. Then, I have a solid 2.5-hour block of heads-down time to make some progress on my projects. I often fit in a quick gym session before a final hour of work.

Before logging off, I make sure my experiments are running so I'll have fresh results in the next morning. I also send a summary of my progress to my London collaborators, giving them the context they need to continue the work.

Overall, my time is roughly 70% heads-down engineering and experimentation and 30% communication and collaboration. Outside of work, I stay current by reading papers, blogs, and posts on platforms like X and LessWrong—essential in a fast-moving field like generative AI.

I work on AGI Safety, where I've contributed to projects on topics like deceptive alignment and risk mitigation. While I can't share specific details, most projects follow a general lifecycle:

1. Ideation & Prototyping (2 days - 2 weeks): We begin with intensive discussions to define the problem we want to solve or the phenomenon we want to measure. This phase involves brainstorming and building small proof-of-concept experiments.

2. Experimentation & Iteration (2 - 8 weeks): This is the core of the project. We are in a tight loop of gathering data, running ablation studies, proposing new ideas, and analyzing results until we have strong evidence to support a finding.

3. Synthesis & Reporting (2 days - 2 weeks): Once we have conclusive results, we write a report or paper to share our findings with the broader research community.

Project timelines vary based on scope and difficulty, but they are always highly collaborative and empirical driven.

A common question is how the Research Engineer (RE) role differs from the Research Scientist (RS) role.

The simplest distinction is in the primary focus. An RS typically spends their time 70% on research and 30% on engineering, while for an RE, that ratio is reversed.

• Research Scientists (RS) tend to focus on the "what": defining research directions, staying on top of literature, proposing novel ideas, and shaping the narrative of a paper.

• Research Engineers (RE) tend to focus on the "how": scaling up experiments, building robust data pipelines, conducting rigorous ablation studies, and ensuring code quality and reproducibility.

In practice, the lines blur. A strong RE or RS is skilled at both, and we decide how to divide tasks based on who can provide the most marginal value. For example, an RS might propose a promising new research direction, and the RE will immediately design and execute the experiments to validate it empirically.

To use an analogy, if a research project is a sailboat, the RS often sets the direction, while the RE provides the driving force.

I hope this gives you a clearer picture of what it's like to be a Research Engineer. Let me know if you have any other topics you wanna read about!