Bioinformatics Applied AI Engineer

Description

We are looking for a Bioinformatics Applied AI Engineer to build AI-powered workflows that drive insight in bioinformatics and metabolomic chemistry.

Company

Bactobio is a London biotech startup. We work to solve the antimicrobial resistance crisis across healthcare and agriculture by producing the next generation of market-leading antimicrobials. Since inception in 2020, Bactobio has built a deep-tech platform that combines AI, synthetic biology, and multiomics to routinely discover new antimicrobial classes from nature. Our antimicrobial platform is fully operational. We use it to build portfolios of new, safe, and effective antimicrobial classes that bypass resistance, aimed at the most serious diseases, and move them towards commercialisation.

Our culture is built around impact, empowerment, and collaboration. We attract incredible scientists from world-leading institutions, mix them with operational experts, and provide guidance through industry leaders acting as mentors. We strongly believe that diversity combined with open and inclusive conversations leads to better solutions. As a result, we have created a collaborative work environment, where ambitious people enjoy working together to make the world greener and safer.

Role

This role lies at the heart of our discovery engine. You’ll design and build LLM workflows that support decision-making in bioinformatics and metabolomic chemistry at Bactobio, using the latest capabilities in modern AI.

You'll turn messy scientific questions and trade-offs into recommendations scientists can use and trust, working in Python with frontier models and our proprietary biological data.

This is an applied role that ships code. We love to explore, but our goal is always something that runs, gets used, and moves the platform forward.

You'll thrive here if you care about AI and biology in equal measure and want your work tied to real experiments, real decisions, and real outcomes. Gaps are yours to fill, ideas are yours to try, and being wrong now and then is part of the work. You won't be a cog in the machine; you'll be a creative voice with room to use it.

Team

You’ll be joining a vibrant, tight-knit, and highly collaborative company of about fifty people. We sit together and take genuine interest in one another's work. Your home will be the Bioinformatics \& Machine Learning team, but day to day you’ll work with microbiologists, chemists, automation and software engineers, and the business development team, with a front-row seat to the strategic and commercial decisions that shape the company.

Everyone who writes code at Bactobio contributes to a single shared codebase. We care about well-designed data models, best practices with sensible implementations, and building a tech stack that’s productive, maintainable, and genuinely enjoyable to work in.### Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate daily with wet-lab scientists to turn ambiguous scientific decisions into well-specified tasks with clear success criteria.
• Design and build multi-step LLM workflows that query biological data and knowledge graphs and produce recommendations with traceable reasoning.
• Build benchmarking infrastructure and curate evaluation datasets.
• Keep up with frontier model capabilities, and iterate on models, prompts, tool design, and orchestration.
• Contribute to our software platform, especially data architecture, pipelines, and model/workflow deployment.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

*What you’ll need** A Master's or PhD in a quantitative field with a significant ML/AI component, or at least two years of ML/AI-focused industry experience.

• Strong understanding of LLMs (including tool use and evaluation), knowledge graphs, and multimodal data.
• Comfort working with biological data (omics and experimental metadata) and collaborating with domain experts.
• Proficiency in Python, with substantial experience in modern ML and data science tooling.

*What will make you stand out** A research or industry track record applying ML in biotech or adjacent scientific settings.

• Experience shipping production code in a shared codebase.

Benefits

The starting salary range for this role is £45–65K.

We aim to pay competitively and fairly, guided by market data and internal consistency. Offers will vary based on experience, skills, seniority, and role scope. We’ll discuss general compensation ranges early in the process to keep things transparent.

Other benefits include:* The chance to be part of a fun, multicultural, kind, ambitious and impact-driven crowd

• Daily access to leaders and mentors in the business
• Brand new, modern labs in Central London with dedicated office space, large balconies, and 360’ views of the London skyline, where we all spend 4 days per week (1 day working from home)
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays
• Paid maternity leave (12 weeks) and paternity/new parent leave (6 weeks)
• Up to 2 months of fully paid sick leave
• Flexible start and finish times within the company’s core hours to fit your preferences
• 4 weeks of paid sabbatical leave after 5 years of service
• Diverse team of colleagues (check out our website to meet us)
• Complimentary snacks, fruits, tea, coffee, soft drinks,...
• Access to 1000s of training courses through Udemy, with an allowance for both personal development and work-related training
• Bike2Work scheme
• Employee Assistance Programme offering structured counselling, life and career coaching, legal and financial advice

About Bactobio

We are a London-based biotechnology startup using breakthrough technologies in synthetic biology, next-generation sequencing and machine learning to cultivate the 99% of previously unculturable microbes. These microbes constitute the biggest bioresource in life, and our exclusive access allows us to discover novel chemicals that can be applied across a variety of markets.

We are impact-driven. Our first goal is to solve the growing antimicrobial resistance crisis through novel antibiotics and stabilise global food security through novel natural biodegradable fungicides.