Autonomous Lab Orchestration Engineer

Ellison Institute, LLC; Oxford; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Enhanced holiday pay

Pension

Life Assurance

Private Medical Insurance

Hospital Cash Plan

Therapy Services

Perk Box

Electric Car Scheme

Job summary

Ellison Institute is hiring a Software Engineer to build software that orchestrates autonomous laboratory systems. You will join a cross-disciplinary team of software, robotics, and biology researchers, turning agent intent into safe, actionable lab workflows.

You will work on scheduling across instruments, tool interfaces for LLM agents, and guardrails around hardware actions. The role emphasizes correctness, recoverability, and observable behavior in real-time experiments.

Qualifications

• Solid software engineering fundamentals including version control, CI/CD, debugging, and API design.
• Fluency with design patterns and architectural structure to apply them judiciously.
• Strong Python skills with typing, testing, packaging, and asynchronous work where appropriate.
• Experience designing and building systems with maintainable code and clear interfaces.
• Experience using agentic AI coding tools and evaluating their outputs.

Responsibilities

• Design and build software that orchestrates autonomous laboratory systems and scheduling workflows.
• Develop the agentic layer of platforms, including tool interfaces for LLM agents and decision logic.
• Close control loops with sensing and verification to ensure safe lab operations.

Skills

Python

API design

CI/CD

Debugging

Testing

Design patterns

Version control

Async programming

Systems integration

Robotics familiarity

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

LLM APIs

Vendor SDKs

Job description

Ellison Institute is hiring a Software Engineer to build software that orchestrates autonomous laboratory systems. You will join a cross-disciplinary team of software, robotics, and biology researchers, turning agent intent into safe, actionable lab workflows.

You will work on scheduling across instruments, tool interfaces for LLM agents, and guardrails around hardware actions. The role emphasizes correctness, recoverability, and observable behavior in real-time experiments.