Lead Software Engineer in Oxford

Join EIT's AI and Robotics team to build software that helps scientists use AI agents in their research. Our LifeAI platform connects models, scientific tools, data and compute so researchers can investigate questions, run analyses and review results. Initial applications include genomic analysis and protein design.

We are looking for a hands-on technical leader to own the backend architecture and engineering delivery of our science-agent platform, with AI engineers reporting directly to you. You will write production code, set technical direction and lead the team's delivery. Your early focus will be agent orchestration, tool integration and the controls that let scientists inspect and guide work as it runs.

You will build on EIT's existing agent framework and work with scientific product managers, researchers and platform teams. You will have direct access to the scientists using what you build, and the scope to turn lessons from individual workflows into reusable software.

Key Responsibilities

• Define how tools declare their inputs, outputs, versions and access requirements, and build the registry agents select from.
• Build workflow selection and the first coordination loop: a specialist agent proposes a plan, a reviewer checks it, unresolved decisions go to a person.
• Connect approvals, progress and results to each workflow so scientists can inspect and steer work while it runs.
• Extend the execution framework for long-running scientific jobs: retries, timeouts, cancellation, duplicate submissions and interrupted runs.
• Enforce access checks, credential boundaries and approval rules in execution paths, including delegated work.
• Own the release gate: integration checks that stop framework or tool changes silently breaking a supported workflow.
• Instrument the service across model calls, tools and compute jobs, and use production evidence to improve reliability, latency and cost.
• Turn scientist and PM requirements into small, testable releases and decide which engineering problems get solved first.
• Work with a team of backend, agent and full-stack engineers: design and code reviews, standards for testing and AI-assisted development, and each person's growth.
• Partner with infrastructure, data and bioinformatics teams on deployment and shared services; reuse what exists before building.

Essential Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

If you meet most of these, we'd like to hear from you.

• You have shipped multi-step agentic workflows to production, with tool integrations and state management.
• You have built human approval steps and failure recovery into automated systems.
• You have owned the architecture and implementation of backend services that others depend on.
• You design APIs and data models that other engineers can maintain.
• You can reason about state, concurrency and partial failure when work spans several services.
• You use logs, metrics and traces to find production problems and stop them recurring.
• You can scope ambiguous work and explain trade-offs to scientists and product managers.
• You can collaborate with domain experts, challenge unclear requirements and distinguish successful execution from a scientifically useful result.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

These are optional; you do not need to meet them to apply.

• Experience with workflow engines such as Temporal, job queues, containers, Kubernetes or scientific/HPC compute environments.
• Experience building reusable tool integrations, agent frameworks, MCP interfaces or evaluation infrastructure.
• Familiarity with computational biology, bioinformatics, protein design or software used by laboratory researchers.
• Experience with data-access controls, isolated code execution or systems handling sensitive research data.
• Ability to build a lightweight interface or work across frontend/backend boundaries when a workflow needs it.
• Experience introducing coding agents into a team's development process while maintaining clear review, testing and ownership standards.

Benefits

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!