Software Engineer - Orchestration
Ellison Institute of Technology21 days ago
Oxford, United KingdomSenior
Responsibilities
- Design and build orchestration software for autonomous laboratories, including scheduling, workflow execution, state management, error handling, and recovery.
- Develop agentic platform capabilities such as LLM tool interfaces, planning logic, guardrails, and human approval workflows for physical hardware.
- Close control loops with sensing so systems verify outcomes and leave workcells in known states after failures.
- Integrate robot arms, liquid handlers, incubators, imagers, and plate readers using vendor SDKs, serial and network protocols, and incomplete documentation.
- Build internal Python libraries and services with clear interfaces, testing, packaging, asynchronous capabilities, and hardware simulation support.
- Design data models and pipelines for experimental data, sample tracking, and provenance.
- Work with scientists to translate manual biological protocols into automated workflows.
- Use and help establish practices for AI-assisted coding tools, including context management, configuration, testing, and review.
- Contribute to code review, CI, testing strategy, deployment, documentation, and shared engineering standards.
- Support laboratory commissioning and on-site debugging when software issues emerge during hardware operation.
Requirements
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including version control, code review, CI/CD, debugging, and API design.
- Strong professional Python experience, including type hints, testing, packaging, and asynchronous programming where appropriate.
- Experience designing and building maintainable systems used by other engineers, rather than only scripts.
- Practical experience with agentic AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent.
- Experience integrating external systems such as hardware, third-party APIs, or legacy interfaces.
- Ability to work effectively in ambiguous R&D environments and collaborate with non-software specialists.
- Preferred experience includes startup and larger engineering environments, production LLM APIs, tool use, structured output, evaluation, cost and latency management, and Model Context Protocol.
- Preferred experience includes concurrency, distributed systems, job scheduling, robotics software, ROS, real-time or hardware-adjacent control systems, laboratory automation, LIMS, ELN systems, scientific data management, computer vision, sensor fusion, learned control policies, Docker, Kubernetes, and experimental science.
Benefits
- Enhanced holiday pay, pension, life assurance, income protection, private medical insurance, hospital cash plan, therapy services, Perk Box, and an electric car scheme.
- Hybrid workplace in Oxford, United Kingdom.
- Collaborative, inclusive environment with support for creative risk-taking, curiosity, and professional development.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Ellison Institute of Technology
Ellison Institute of Technology is a privately held research institute headquartered in Oxford, founded in 2023, focused on AI, robotics, health and generative biology, climate/CO2 management, and sustainable agriculture. It runs research programs and labs to translate discoveries into products and spinout companies, working across science, engineering, and policy. Its Oxford campus includes a 300,000 sq ft facility slated for 2027 and a planned 2 million sq ft expansion at The Oxford Science Park, designed by Foster + Partners.