AI Engineering Lead — Production-Scale LLM Systems

Substrate Bio; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 days annual leave

Learning budget

Equity

Job summary

Substrate is hiring an AI engineering lead as the first engineering hire on the intelligence software product. You will write much of the first production code, help shape the architecture, and influence the engineering culture as the team grows.

The role involves building AI Scientist and AI Assays atop the lab's operational data, coordinating the intelligence team's work, and pushing the technical roadmap. London-based with in-person time at King’s Cross.

Qualifications

• Five or more years of professional software engineering experience.
• Direct experience putting LLMs, foundation models, or agentic systems into production at scale.
• Working comfort with the LLM harness layer: token economics, retrieval, evaluation, structured output, large-scale data processing through models.
• Strong working comfort with Python.
• Track record of designing systems that other engineers built on top of.

Responsibilities

• Land in the team and lock the architecture for AI Scientist and the harness layer.
• Ship the first end-to-end thin slice: literature ingestion, gap identification, and a working agentic loop.
• Help set the engineering culture for the intelligence team: code review, evaluation, deployment, observability.
• Stand up the data capture infrastructure for AI Assays. Define the schema and feedback path back from operational software.
• Bring AI Scientist into production. Wire its outputs into how Substrate allocates the reserved R&D capacity across verticals.
• Help shape the technical roadmap for the intelligence team as the AI engineer and data engineer come online.
• Ship the first version of AI Assays and connect protocol-optimisation suggestions back into the assay design loop.
• Move from primarily writing code to helping coordinate the intelligence team’s work across product surfaces.

Skills

Senior Software Eng

LLM production experience

Harness layer familiarity

Python proficiency

System design experience

Job description

Substrate is hiring an AI engineering lead as the first engineering hire on the intelligence software product. You will write much of the first production code, help shape the architecture, and influence the engineering culture as the team grows.

The role involves building AI Scientist and AI Assays atop the lab's operational data, coordinating the intelligence team's work, and pushing the technical roadmap. London-based with in-person time at King’s Cross.