Machine learning engineer for plant DNA (fixed term, April to June 2027) IsoGentiX Ltd Decode:Protect

IsoGentiX is a young UK company building the genetic record of Madagascar’s endemic plants, to be sequenced in Madagascar, with community consent and benefit-sharing agreed before anything is collected. We are seeking UK grant funding to build a genomic language model that can tell what a plant is, and which of its genes make medicine-like molecules, from its DNA alone, with no reference genome. Most of the world’s plants have never been sequenced; this is the tool that changes that.

What you would do

• Adapt an open plant DNA language model (such as PlantCaduceus) to noisy, low-coverage Oxford Nanopore long reads
• Train two heads: one that places an unknown specimen (known species, nearest relative, or likely new), one that flags genes in alkaloid biosynthesis pathways
• Build and run a benchmark on held-out genomes against current tools, with targets set in advance
• Write up the results for a technical white paper

You have

• Hands-on experience training (not only using) a deep learning model on DNA, RNA or protein sequence
• Contrastive or metric learning, and careful benchmark design
• PyTorch on cloud GPUs
• An MSc or PhD in machine learning, computational biology or bioinformatics, or equivalent experience
• The right to work in the UK

Nice to have

plant genomics, long-read data, natural products or drug discovery.

Terms

three-month full-time UK employment contract, £30,000 to £40,000 for the three months, remote within the UK. Conditional on grant funding, with a decision expected end of January 2027.

Why this is interesting

data no one else will hold, a real benchmark problem, and a project built to get benefit-sharing right, unlike the Madagascar periwinkle, whose cancer drugs earned over a billion dollars while Madagascar received nothing.

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