Senior Scientific Data Engineer, Data Platform

Your work will change lives. Including your own. Recursion is a leading, clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Central to its mission is the Recursion Operating System (OS), a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological, chemical and patient-centric datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale—up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly—and massive computational scale—owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world—Recursion is uniting technology, biology, chemistry and patient-centric data to advance the future of medicine.

In this role, you will:

• Build, scale, and operate a data platform. You will be a member of the platform team responsible for building, operating, and tuning a data platform that allows users to discover and query across the breadth of our data at Recursion, which includes a chemistry library of billions of compounds, petabytes of cellular microscopy images taken in millions of different experimental contexts, and millions of assay results, all supporting Recursion’s drug discovery.
• Build relatability into a heterogeneous dataset. At Recursion, we generate datasets based on a wide swath of diverse biological models and treatment approaches. You'll work with biologists, chemists, and data scientists to build relatability and query-ability into these datasets so they can be used in the future to answer the sorts of questions we haven't even thought of asking yet.
• Act as a mentor, coach, and sponsor. You will share your technical knowledge and experiences, delivering impact, learning, and growth across teams at Recursion.

The Team You’ll Join

You will join the Data Platform that builds and maintains our Data Lake/house, the scientific data products we own, and the pipelines that feed them. The team you will join is responsible for all our data products that are composed of public and 3rd party data feeds (e.g. ChEMBL, patents, reactions, chemical vendor catalogues), which includes the infrastructure to build them and the expertise in how to use and integrate them with the rest of the company. This team solves the problem of making our diverse data discoverable, queryable, and relatable across datasets, while continuing to add new data sets and data modalities as we grow. This will require collaboration with many different groups in order to share best practices for usage of our data products, and to receive feedback to keep our products fit for purpose.

The Experience You’ll Need

• A degree in drug-discovery related science (e.g. Chemistry, Biology) - you will need to make informed choices on the scientific data you work with.
• Excited about the possibilities of biological and chemical data transforming drug discovery, and owning the data products that enable them.
• 5+ years of deep experience in modern, cloud-based data engineering tools to build data platforms that enable the discovery, query, and processing of large datasets. Up to date on industry trends and tools. You understand the tradeoffs between different data platform architectures and technologies like a data lake, a data warehouse and can draw on this knowledge to develop data platforms solutions for Recursion.
• Excitement to learn parts of our tech stack that you might not already know. Our current tech stack includes: Python, dbt, Prefect, BigQuery, Datastream, FiveTran, PostgreSQL, Agentic coding, GCS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code. Our cloud services are provided by Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience working collaboratively on projects with significant ambiguity and technical complexity, ideally spanning multiple systems and involving diverse technologies.
• A people-first mindset. Despite the deadlines, we always prioritize supporting our coworkers in their growth and experience.
• A drive to deliver technical solutions that are easily monitored and understood as they run in production and the effects of change can be readily quantified.

Working Location & Compensation:

This position can be based at either our London or Milton Park office. Please note that we are a hybrid environment and ask that employees spend 50% of their time in the office. At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is £75,900 - £101,900. You will also be eligible for an annual bonus and equity compensation, as well as a comprehensive benefits package.

The Values We Hope You Share:

• We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
• We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
• We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
• We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
• We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
• We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.

Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.