Time Series Researcher - Forward deployed

About the role

Applied Computing was founded in 2024 to build Orbital, a physics-informed foundation model for energy operations. We're live across oil and gas, refineries, and petrochemicals, working towards our mission: sustainable abundance for a growing planet. The hydrocarbon industry keeps the world running. But its complexity has left operators tied to legacy systems, making critical decisions on less than 10% of available data. We built Orbital to change that. It's a foundation model built specifically for energy that lets companies use AI at scale, harnessing all of their operational data and optimising in real time for any metric. Decisions get faster, operations get safer, and carbon intensity falls. We've raised over $32 million, including one of the largest seed rounds for an AI company in the UK. We're just getting started.

The Time Series Researcher owns the core of Orbital's temporal intelligence. This role exists to design, validate, and deploy foundational time-series models that operate under real world constraints: noisy sensors, partial observability, physical laws, and high economic stakes. This is a customer facing role part of forward deployed team working with customer engineering teams to fine tune our model to their plants. This is not offline research. You will own the full lifecycle; from theoretical formulation and experimentation to real-time inference, uncertainty estimation, and continuous retraining in production.

How we work: research is judged by production impact, not paper count. We value principled models that survive contact with reality. We iterate aggressively, benchmark honestly, and ship responsibly. Physics, statistics, and learning are treated as complementary, not competing.

What this role is not: elegant offline academic research disconnected from deployment; pure deep‑learning experimentation without domain grounding; feature engineering on static datasets; a support role – this position owns core IP.

Responsibilities

• Orbital's foundational time-series modelling stack
• Physics-informed and probabilistic model design
• Uncertainty quantification and robustness under sensor faults
• Research → production translation for time-series models
• Benchmarking standards and validation protocols used across the company
• Design core time-series architectures supporting forecasting, classification / anomaly detection, optimisation &