Software Engineer - AI in Oxford

Join us at the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), where 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, and Artificial Intelligence & Robotics. This is ambitious 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 from lab to society.

Your Role:

We are seeking Software Engineers to build robust, scalable software systems that power EIT’s scientific initiatives. You will contribute to the full software lifecycle—from architectural design and API development to testing and deployment—ensuring our technology stack is reliable, modular, and built to the highest engineering standards.

Requirements

• Design and build robust backend services, APIs, and software modules that power scientific applications and products.
• Bridge diverse components, integrating ML inference servers, hardware interfaces, and data pipelines into cohesive systems, while ensuring high availability and low latency.
• Own the full production path—from architectural design and coding to automated testing, benchmarking, deployment, and observability.
• Collaborate effectively within a multi-disciplinary team of Data Engineers, AI Scientists, Software Engineers, and Domain Experts.
• Champion software engineering best practices maintaining high standards of code quality, system security, and transparency.

What makes you a great fit:

• MSc or equivalent experience in Computer Sciences, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Extensive experience as a Software Engineer, with required proficiency in Python, including proven success in implementing and deploying robust, scalable distributed systems in production.
• Demonstrated experience designing, managing, and orchestrating complex systems involving scalable data infrastructure, hardware interfaces, and machine learning models.
• Expertise in defining and exposing functionality via clean, well-documented APIs (e.g., REST, gRPC).
• Proven experience implementing and managing robust CI/CD pipelines and reproducible development workflows.
• Strong collaborator able to clearly communicate system design, architecture decisions, and software engineering practices to multi-disciplinary teams.

You may also have:

• Experience leveraging Kubernetes for application deployment, and familiarity with distributed computing frameworks (e.g., Ray, Spark), or specialised batch schedulers/resource managers (e.g., Slurm, Volcano, Kueue).
• Demonstrated expertise with specialised serving engines (e.g., vLLM, Triton) or techniques for deploying models in resource-constrained or high-throughput environments.
• Experience managing and deploying production systems across diverse environments, including cloud, on-premises clusters, and edge devices.
• Proven ability to thrive in fast-paced, dynamic R&D settings, demonstrating high autonomy necessary to translate scientific objectives into high-quality software.

Team Leadership & People Management (Relevant for roles with people leadership responsibilities)

• Lead with empathy, curiosity, and clarity, modelling the behaviours that help others do their best work.
• Set clear goals, ways of working, and measures of success that create alignment while protecting autonomy and creativity.
• Invest in people’s growth and wellbeing through regular feedback, coaching, and opportunities to stretch and learn.
• Create an inclusive environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed, debate is constructive, and people feel safe to challenge ideas.
• Make fair, thoughtful decisions around work allocation, recognition, hiring, and performance, using consistent and bias-aware approaches aligned with EIT's values and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) commitments.

Benefits

• Enhanced holiday pay
• Pension
• Life Assurance
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance
• Hospital Cash Plan
• Therapy Services
• Perk Box
• Electric Car Scheme

Working Together – What It Involves:

• You must have the right to work permanently in the UK with a willingness to travel as necessary.
• You will live in, or within easy commuting distance of, Oxford.