Software Engineer - Intent Translation
Ellison Institute of Technology20 days ago
Oxford, United KingdomMid Level
Responsibilities
- Capture scientific knowledge and undocumented decisions from manual protocols and encode it into automated workflows.
- Define sensing, measurement, verification, and quality-control steps for reliable automated runs.
- Design data models and pipelines for experimental data, sample tracking, and provenance.
- Build protocol formats, CLI tooling, web interfaces, and dashboards for scientists.
- Validate automated protocols against manual baselines using appropriate comparisons and controls.
- Integrate liquid handlers, incubators, imagers, and plate readers through vendor SDKs and instrument interfaces.
- Contribute to orchestration and execution systems that schedule work across shared laboratory resources.
- Develop and maintain internal Python libraries and services, including hardware simulation capabilities.
- Support laboratory commissioning, debugging, code review, testing, documentation, and broader engineering practices.
- Represent scientific constraints within the engineering team and explain engineering limitations to scientists.
Requirements
- Strong professional Python experience with maintainable code used by others.
- Sound software engineering judgment, including appropriate structure, separation of concerns, and design patterns.
- Understanding of experimental design, controls, and methods for establishing reliable results.
- Experience handling scientific data, instrument outputs, file formats, metadata, and reproducible analyses.
- Ability to work through ambiguity in an R&D environment and communicate effectively with scientific and engineering audiences.
- Preferred experience includes wet-lab work in molecular biology, biochemistry, chemistry, plant science, tissue culture, transformation, or aseptic technique.
- Preferred experience includes laboratory automation, LIMS, ELN, sample management, imaging or computer vision for biological samples, concurrency, scheduling, hardware integration, vendor SDKs, or scientific Python open source projects.
- Experience using agentic AI coding tools such as Claude Code or Cursor is desirable.
- Startup or small-team experience with end-to-end ownership is desirable.
Benefits
- Enhanced holiday pay.
- Pension.
- Life Assurance.
- Income Protection.
- Private Medical Insurance.
- Hospital Cash Plan.
- Therapy Services.
- Perk Box.
- Electric Car Scheme.
- Full-time, on-site role in Oxford, United Kingdom.