Staff Backend Engineer (AI Lab | £170,000)

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.

Location: City of London, London, GB

Posted Date: 11/1/2025