Product Engineer AI & Robotics Oxford, England, United Kingdom

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we’re on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, policy makers, and entrepreneurs to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges in four transformative areas: Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology, Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture, Climate Change & Managing CO₂, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics.

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you’ll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas for lab to society.

Job Summary: We're building the human-facing layer of a platform at the intersection of AI, automation, and frontier science - the part that turns complex scientific workflows into something the scientists and lab teams who depend on them can use every day. This product is already for internal users and it's about to grow fast. We're expanding it into new areas and scaling it to handle increasingly complex, agile scientific workflows, which means significant new product surface to design and build, alongside strengthening and extending what's already there. There's a lot to own here. This layer is also an integration seam: it connects embodied-AI and LLM capabilities with the data and platform systems beneath. You'll span that seam - surfacing what the ML, software, and robotics teams build into something people can actually use. Frontend is your primary surface, but you're comfortable owning the whole stack. You'll own features end-to-end, work independently, and keep a web of stakeholders aligned and unblocked. If you're energised by working at the intersection of AI, robotics, and real science and want to see what you build used by scientists doing work that matters - you'll thrive here.

Job Responsibilities:

• Own features end-to-end — from a rough product hypothesis to a shipped, instrumented experience scientists rely on daily.
• Work across the application layer — frontend state, API contracts, real-time data flows — making sound calls on systems that are already in use.
• Ramp quickly into live systems and make them better — building new features and surfaces while strengthening what's already there.
• Coordinate across the teams whose work feeds this surface — Machine Learning, AI Research, Data Engineering, and Platform — communicating proactively and driving clarity where requirements are still forming.
• Turn loosely-specified problems into shippable scope: prototype, get it in front of real users, iterate.
• Hold the line on reliability and user experience — these are scientific workflows where reproducibility and provenance matter.

What We're Looking For:

• 5+ years of product / software engineering experience.
• Strong track record in a fast-moving environment — you've shipped real products, taken ownership without being asked, and know what good looks like.
• You bring an entrepreneurial mindset.
• A full-stack engineer with frontend as your primary surface.
• You're confident with TypeScript/JavaScript and React (or similar) and comfortable owning the whole stack — APIs, data flows, and the systems beneath.
• Strong product sense — you make and explain trade-offs between technical and UX considerations.
• A proactive communicator who manages dependencies across teams and surfaces issues early.
• Genuinely drawn to autonomous labs and scientific automation, and curious about the people you're building for.

Nice to Have:

• A strong plus: prior experience building software in or close to a scientific environment — alongside scientists, in pharmaceutical companies, biotech, or research/clinical lab settings.
• Familiarity with instrument APIs, lab protocols, and the data-quality expectations of scientific workflows.
• Experience building AI/ML-powered product features, or working closely with ML teams to bring models into a product.
• Experience with human-in-the-loop or human‑machine interaction products.

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!