Lead Bio-ML Engineer
Oxford, UK
£100k+ & Equity
About The Company
I'm working with an early-stage biotech startup based in Oxford building machine learning-driven platforms for drug discovery. Their mission is to dramatically reduce the time and cost of bringing new therapies to market by combining computational biology, large-scale biological datasets, and modern ML techniques.
Backed by top-tier investors, they're a small, high-calibre team of scientists and engineers.
Overview
We're hiring a Lead Bio-ML Engineer to take ownership of our core machine learning systems.
This is a high-impact, high-autonomy role where you'll:
* Own the end-to-end ML lifecycle (data, modelling, deployment)
* Work closely with biologists to translate experimental problems into ML solutions
* Build and scale models across areas like sequence modelling, structure prediction, and multimodal biological data
* Shape the technical direction and ML roadmap
* Mentor and grow a small team as they scale
What You'll Do
* Designing models for genomics, proteomics, and drug discovery pipelines
* Applying deep learning / foundation models to biological datasets
* Building robust, production-ready ML systems (not just research prototypes)
* Developing internal tooling for data pipelines, experiment tracking, and model evaluation
What They Want
Core experience:
* Strong background in machine learning / AI engineering
* Experience applying ML to life sciences, bioinformatics, or computational biology
* Production experience with Python + PyTorch / TensorFlow
* Track record of owning and shipping ML systems end-to-end
Nice to have:
* Experience with biological data (e.g. sequencing, protein structures)
* Familiarity with drug discovery or wet-lab collaboration
* Exposure to LLMs / foundation models in biology
* Previous startup or high-ownership environment
Recap
* High ownership: you'll define and build critical systems from the ground up
* Real-world impact: your work directly contributes to therapeutic discovery
* Tight feedback loop: collaborate daily with domain experts
* Equity upside: meaningful stake in an early-stage company
* Small, elite team: no bureaucracy, just execution
Apply
Please apply here or reach out to me directly on LinkedIn/ via email (adam.lockett@sr2rec.co.uk).