Research Engineer / Assistant (Agentic AI for Sustainable Building and Urban Design)
Research Engineer / Assistant (Agentic AI for Sustainable Building and Urban Design)
University-Level Unit:
College of Design and Engineering
Faculty/Department-Level Unit:
The Built Environment
Employee Category:
Research Staff
Location:
Kent Ridge Campus
Posting Start Date:
28/04/2026
Job Description
Model Development:
- Develop and train surrogate ML models (e.g., neural networks, Gaussian processes, gradient boosting) to emulate computationally intensive building and urban performance simulations — including EnergyPlus (thermal/energy), Radiance/Daysim (daylighting), and CFD tools (airflow/microclimate) — enabling real-time performance feedback within agentic design workflows.
- Design and implement agentic AI workflows for building and urban design tasks, including multi-step reasoning pipelines, tool-calling agents
- Integrate large language models (LLMs) with physics-based simulation tools and parametric design environments (e.g., Rhino/Grasshopper, EnergyPlus, QGIS) to automate and accelerate performance-driven design workflows.
Platform and API Development:
- Build and maintain backend services, APIs, and user-facing interfaces that expose AI research outputs to end users in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector; contribute to open-source tools and research prototypes developed within the City Syntax Lab.
- Develop and evaluate benchmarks for LLM spatial reasoning in building and urban contexts, contributing to academic research on AI capabilities and limitations in domain-specific design and simulation tasks.
Research & Dissemination:
- Publish research findings and present at academic conferences; document tools, experiments, and evaluation results to ensure reproducibility and support knowledge transfer within the lab and to external collaborators.
Job Requirements
Essential:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Building/Urban Science, Electrical Engineering, Data Science, or a related field.
- Proficiency in software engineering best practices including version control (Git), containerisation (Docker), CI/CD pipelines, and API design; experience building and deploying production-ready or near-production applications is strongly preferred.
- Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications, including prompt engineering, function/tool calling, agentic pipelines
- Strong Python programming skills; experience with web frameworks and API development (e.g., FastAPI, Flask) and/or frontend development (React, TypeScript) is advantageous.
- Experience with life-cycle carbon assessment methods and tools.
- Genuine interest in sustainable built environments, climate technology, or smart cities; prior exposure to AEC software (e.g., Rhino, Grasshopper, Revit, EnergyPlus) or geospatial tools (QGIS, GIS APIs) is a plus but not required.
- Ability to work in a fast-paced, applied research environment, take ownership of projects, and translate academic research prototypes into functional, deployable tools.
- Strong communication skills and ability to work collaboratively across a multi-disciplinary team spanning AI research, building science, and urban planning.
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