Role: Staff Software Engineer (Python | Backend | Infrastructure)
Location: Hybrid - 2-3 days in London Office
Compensation: Up to £170,000 + equity
We’re working with a frontier AI lab pushing the boundaries of computational biology, combining machine learning, cloud infrastructure, and scientific research to accelerate discoveries in life sciences.
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you’ll build the distributed systems and data infrastructure that power the lab’s next-generation biology platform. From model serving to real-time data processing, your work will form the backbone of a platform enabling scientists to explore and manipulate biological data in entirely new ways.
What you’ll do
* Design and own backend architecture for large-scale, data-intensive applications.
* Develop and optimize APIs that handle complex biological and ML-driven workloads.
* Build and maintain data pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and serving scientific data at scale.
* Deploy and manage infrastructure across Kubernetes and AWS, ensuring robustness and observability.
* Drive system reliability through automated testing, monitoring, and fault-tolerant design.
* Collaborate across disciplines, working with ML engineers, biologists, and platform teams to ensure seamless integration between computation, data, and science.
You should have
* Deep experience building and scaling backend systems and distributed applications.
* Strong coding skills in Python, with an understanding of performance tuning and concurrency.
* Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, AWS, and modern cloud infrastructure.
* Proficiency with databases — schema design, performance optimization, and analytics.
* Familiarity with REST APIs, websockets, and authentication/security best practices.
* A disciplined engineering mindset — you think about reliability, maintainability, and long-term scalability.
Nice-to-haves
* Experience with MLOps and model-serving infrastructure.
* Background in high-performance computing or large-scale scientific workloads.
* Expertise in data pipeline architecture and real-time streaming systems.
* Knowledge of scientific or biological computing environments.
This is a rare opportunity to join a deep-tech AI lab where backend engineering meets scientific discovery, building the systems that let machine learning models and experimental biology evolve together.
If you want to design the infrastructure behind a platform that could change how we understand life itself, we’d love to hear from you.