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.