Director of Engineering (ML Platform), London London

Isomorphic Labs is applying frontier AI to help unlock deeper scientific insights, faster breakthroughs, and life-changing medicines with an ambition to solve all disease. Engineers leading the development of large AI models for drug discovery. This role will be based in our London office, and requires you to be in the office 3 days a week.

Your impact

Reporting directly to the Head of Engineering, you will be responsible for the strategic direction, execution, and operational excellence of our Platform teams, enabling training and serving of the largest foundations models in biotech. These teams include Technical Infrastructure, Machine Learning Platform, Site Reliability team, and Developer Experience for Research. This is a highly influential role that requires deep technical expertise, strong leadership, and a passion for fostering high-performance engineering culture. Your work accelerates cutting-edge research in the drug design space.

What you will do

• Define and execute the long-term vision and strategy for our foundational infrastructure, aligning with company goals and anticipating future needs.
• Lead, mentor, and inspire a diverse team of engineering managers and individual contributors across multiple disciplines (ML Platform, Tech Infrastructure, SRE).
• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, continuous learning, and accountability.
• Oversee the development and evolution of our core platform, ensuring it provides robust, scalable, and developer-friendly services for all engineering teams.
• Lead the teams responsible for building and maintaining the underlying systems that power our user-facing applications, focusing on performance, reliability, and seamless user experiences.
• Guide the development and operation of the infrastructure supporting our prediction models, ensuring high availability, low latency, and efficient data processing for machine learning initiatives.
• Drive the strategy and execution for our core technical infrastructure, including networking, compute, storage, and data centers (on-prem and/or cloud). Optimize for cost, performance, and security.
• Champion and embed SRE principles across the organization, overseeing the SRE team responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our critical systems.
• Establish and enforce best practices for infrastructure operations, including monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and security.
• Drive continuous improvement in system stability and uptime.
• Partner closely with product engineering teams, security, data science, and other stakeholders to understand their needs and deliver foundational solutions that accelerate product development and innovation.
• Evaluate and manage relationships with key internal partners to ensure optimal value and performance.
• Manage the budget for the Foundations Engineering organization, optimizing resource allocation and identifying cost-saving opportunities.

Skills and qualifications

• Experience in software engineering, with a significant portion focused on ML infrastructure, platform, or site reliability engineering.
• Demonstrated experience in a leadership role, managing multiple engineering teams and managers.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP), and modern infrastructure technologies.
• Proven experience with running horizontal Platform Engineering teams.
• Strong background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles and practices, including incident management, observability, performance optimization, and automation.
• Familiarity with data infrastructure and systems supporting machine learning/prediction models.
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to attract, hire, retain, and develop top engineering talent.
• Strategic thinker with a proven ability to define and execute complex technical roadmaps.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a data-driven approach to decision-making.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Nice to have

• Experience in a high-growth, fast-paced environment.
• Experience building and scaling infrastructure for Biotech, Life science AD.

Culture and values

We are guided by our shared values. It's not about finding people who think and act in the same way. These values help to guide our work and will continue to strengthen it.

• Thoughtful: Thoughtful at Iso is about curiosity, creativity and care. It is about good people doing good, rigorous and future-making science every single day.
• Brave: Brave at Iso is about fearlessness, but it’s also about initiative and integrity. The scale of the challenge demands nothing less.
• Determined: Determined at Iso is the way we pursue our goal. It’s a confidence in our hypothesis, as well as the urgency and agility needed to deliver on it. Because disease won’t wait, so neither should we.
• Together: Together at Iso is about connection, collaboration across fields and catalytic relationships. It’s knowing that transformation is a group project, and remembering that what we’re doing will have a real impact on real people everywhere.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

We are committed to equal employment opportunities regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please let us know.