Graphcore’s Bristol office has been home to the company since it was founded in 2016.
Today, many of the teams developing Graphcore’s core technology sit here, working across disciplines to support the next generation of AI computing.
As the company has grown, so have the people within it. Career paths here don’t always follow a straight line – they evolve through curiosity, conversations, and the confidence to explore new opportunities as they emerge.
We spoke to Arianna, Machine Learning Engineering Manager in Bristol, about her journey from Product Support Engineer to leadership, and how curiosity, support, and trust shaped her path along the way.
From PhD to Product
When a recruiter first mentioned Graphcore in 2018, I was completing my PhD in Surgical Robotics and hunting for software roles. I’d been curious about applying simple AI to automate robotic tasks since stumbling upon the ResNet paper, but my thesis left little time for AI-based experiments. The Product Support Engineer role at Graphcore felt like the perfect bridge: a way out of academia, a real start in AI — and a reason to move to Bristol, home of Massive Attack, one of my favourite bands since I was a teenager!
Seven years later, I’m still here, and I now lead the Inference project as ML Engineering Manager within the Applied AI team. The path that took me from being “the bug-fixing person” to owning a product-focused engineering area taught me a lot about learning, trust, and ultimately the type of leader I aspire to be.
