Seed-stage AI for Science Lab | London (on-site)
Overview
RL has pushed coding and maths forward quickly. Biology is harder because evidence is incomplete, feedback is slow, and a model can look like it's improving while quietly gaming the reward. This role exists to build training setups where that can't happen.
The lab is a small, seed-funded founding team in London. They train frontier models as agents on real scientific work: forming hypotheses, planning experiments, reading results.
You'd be one of the first technical hires. There's no inherited stack, so you'd help set the tooling and research standards.
What you'll do
- Train agents with RL on multi-step problems across biology, drug discovery and clinical research
- Build environments where agents query biological data, call scientific tools and act on the output
- Design reward functions and evals that separate real progress from reward hacking
- Build rollout, distributed training and eval infrastructure so a few people can run large experiments
- Own experiments end-to‑end, from design through debugging to reproducible results
- Work with in-house scientists to turn open biological questions into tasks with checkable outcomes
What you'll need
- Hands‑on experience training models or agents with RL
- A first‑principles grasp of reward design, credit assignment, exploration and training stability
- Strong engineering - you write reliable, fast code and can debug from learning dynamics down to GPU performance
- Sound experimental judgement: you know why a run failed and what to try next
- Comfort owning ambiguous problems in a team of a handful of people
- Willingness to work five days a week in the London office
Optional Bonus
- Agentic systems work: tool use, multi-step reasoning or long‑horizon tasks
- Biology or healthcare background - useful, not expected
- PhD or publications in RL, post‑training or scientific ML
Seniority is open, from strong early‑career engineers to senior researchers.
Shortlisted candidates will be contacted within 48 hours.
Research Engineer, Reinforcement Learning in London employer: Axiōma Search
Axiōma Search is an exceptional employer for those passionate about machine learning and time-series forecasting. With a collaborative work culture that prioritises innovation and employee growth, team members are encouraged to explore new ideas and technologies while benefiting from a global network of experts. Located in Europe, the company offers unique opportunities for professional development and the chance to make a significant impact in the field of AI.
