Software Engineer - Life AI Platform AI & Robotics Oxford, England, United Kingdom

Job Summary:

Within EIT’s AI and Robotics team, we believe powerful AI and increasingly capable robotics will meaningfully accelerate science discovery.

We are building a platform to empower scientists to move from a question, to a designed experiment, to a result on the bench—without having to do the plumbing themselves.

This is an undefined product category. You will be part of the founding team to shape the product and the architecture. To begin with, you'd be building for EIT's own scientists, in the same institute. They're a short walk from your desk, not behind an account manager or a research panel.

You’ll own the system architecture from model endpoint to interface. We build prototypes to learn from, and we're willing to throw them away. What comes next depends on what that pilot teaches us, and you'll have a large hand in deciding it.

This role starts as an individual contributor, with the opportunity to build a team over time. You become the technical anchor for how AI models reach the scientists who need them — the person who owns that seam and establishes the technical approach.

Day-to-Day, You Will

• Build an agentic workflow for scientists end to end, from model endpoints to the user interface. There is nobody to hand a ticket to at the beginning.

• Build and operate the technical foundations for agentic systems, including orchestration, tool interfaces, state management, evaluation, observability and failure recovery.

• Design evaluative frameworks to understand if the deployed model is working

• Work directly with scientists, observe how they operate and translate what you learn into clear engineering priorities.

• Synthesise the knowledge from individual workflows to build generalisable capability

• Partner with product, data and research to shape the roadmap and ship at speed in an emerging category where the most impactful problems remain unsolved.

What We're Looking For

• You’ve built and shippedsystems from scratchas acore engineer and independent contributor or have created something new and standalone inside a larger organisation. You can turn an open-ended problem into a clear technical strategy and working software.

• You’ve built agentic AI products, not just used them.You understand orchestration, tool use, human-in-the-loop review and evaluation, and have dealt with agentsand their typical failure modes.

• You’ve designed andbuiltproduction-readysystems.You can make sound decisions about APIs, data models, testing, deployment, observability and failure recovery.

• You’ve built policy-aware systems with durable audit trails.Constraints are enforced by design, and every decision leaves a trustworthy, queryable record.

• You are full-stack and self-sufficient.You can take a system from model endpoint to production interface without waiting for someone else to fill the gaps.

• You can create clarity from ambiguity.You are comfortable setting technical direction and making trade-offs between what is technically elegant and what usersneed for adoption.

Nice to Have

Any of these is a meaningful plus:

• A strong plus:direct life-science or lab experience– for example inprotein design, computational biology, bioinformatics, or building tools alongside bench scientists.

• Building the internal tooling and standards that let ateamwork with coding agents well-not just doing it yourself.

• Scientific visualisation-3D molecular structure, large result sets, comparison and triage interfaces.

• Experience as an engineering lead or manager who has chosen to come back to building. We'd want to talk about why.

We offer the following salary and benefits:

• Enhanced holiday pay
• Pension
• Life Assurance
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance
• Hospital Cash Plan
• Therapy Services
• Perk Box
• Electric Car Scheme

Why work for EIT:

At the Ellison Institute, we believe a collaborative, inclusive team is key to our success. We are building a supportive environment where creative risks are encouraged, and everyone feels heard. Valuing emotional intelligence, empathy, respect, and resilience, we encourage people to be curious and to have a shared commitment to excellence. Join us and make an impact!

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