Machine Learning Performance Engineer, London

Isomorphic Labs; City of Westminster; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A pioneering drug design company in the UK seeks engineers to innovate at the intersection of AI and drug design. Join the model performance team to develop custom GPU kernels and optimize distributed training strategies for real-world applications. Ideal candidates will have extensive experience with HPC and ML systems, strong understanding of GPU architectures, and a collaborative mindset. This role offers the opportunity to significantly impact drug discovery and contribute to groundbreaking innovations.

Qualifications

• Significant industry experience in HPC and ML systems.
• Good understanding of GPU and AI accelerator architectures.
• Strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms.
• Experience with deep learning ML frameworks, preferably JAX.

Responsibilities

• Develop custom GPU kernels to enhance performance.
• Design and optimize distributed training strategies.
• Implement optimizations to overcome hardware limitations.
• Diagnose and debug performance bottlenecks.

Skills

HPC and ML systems

GPU architectures

Data structures and algorithms

Maths / linear algebra

Deep learning frameworks (JAX)

Collaboration skills

Job description

This is an exciting opportunity for you to contribute to frontier research at the intersection of AI and drug design. Working in a highly creative, iterative environment, you will join the model performance and scaling team, where you will partner with scientists and engineers to scale foundational models that will transform the biopharmaceutical world as we know it. You will draw upon your existing engineering experience whilst learning from those around you, to apply novel techniques and ideas to newly encountered model and systems performance optimizations, as well as machine learning, computational biology and chemistry problems.

What you will do

• Develop custom GPU kernels maximising utilisation and application performance.
• Help design, implement, and optimize distributed training and inference strategies.
• Implement low-level optimisations to overcome hardware limitations.
• Diagnose and debug performance bottlenecks to optimise latency and throughput, impacting real world drug design programs.
• Design low-precision algorithms balancing high performance with minimal accuracy loss.
• Collaborate with researchers to create efficient training and inference model architectures.

Qualifications

• Significant industry experience and strong working knowledge of HPC and ML systems.
• Good understanding of GPU and other AI accelerator architectures.
• Strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms.
• Good working knowledge of maths / linear algebra.
• Experience with deep learning ML frameworks (preferably JAX).
• Excellent collaboration skills.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of XLA, Triton, Pallas, CUDA or similar accelerator DSLs / compiler stacks.
• Experience with distributed training and data/model sharding strategies.
• Knowledge of collective communication libraries (e.g. NCCL).
• Experience with optimising ML accuracy using low-precision formats.
• Experience building, deploying and maintaining production systems on GCP.
• Interest in chemistry and biology.

Culture & values

Isomorphic Labs is applying frontier AI to help unlock deeper scientific insights, faster breakthroughs, and life‑changing medicines with an ambition to solve all disease. The future is coming. A future enabled and enriched by the incredible power of machine learning. A future in which diseases are curtailed or cured starting with better and faster drug discovery. Come and be part of an interdisciplinary team driving groundbreaking innovation and play a meaningful role in contributing towards us achieving our ambitious goals, while being a part of an inspiring and collaborative culture. The world we want tomorrow is the one we’re building today. It starts with the culture at this company. It starts with you.

About Iso: Isomorphic Labs (IsoLabs) was launched in 2021 to advance human health by building on and beyond the Nobel‑winning AlphaFold system. Since then, our interdisciplinary team of drug discovery experts and machine learning specialists has built powerful new predictive and generative AI models that accelerate scientific discovery at digital speed. Our name comes from the belief that there is an underlying symmetry between biology and information science. By harnessing AI’s powerful capabilities, we can use it to model complex biological phenomena to help design novel molecules, anticipate how drugs will perform and develop innovative medicines to treat and cure some of the world’s most devastating diseases. We have built a world‑leading drug design engine comprising AI models that are capable of working across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities. We are continually innovating on model architecture and developing cutting‑edge capabilities to advance rational drug design. Every day, and with each new breakthrough, we’re getting closer to the promise of digital biology, and achieving our ambitious mission to one day solve all disease with the help of AI.

We are guided by our shared values. It’s not about finding people who think and act in the same way. These values help to guide our work and will continue to strengthen it. Thoughtful at Iso is about curiosity, creativity and care. It is about good people doing good, rigorous and future‑making science every single day. Brave at Iso is about fearlessness, but it’s also about initiative and integrity. The scale of the challenge demands nothing less. Determined at Iso is the way we pursue our goal. It’s a confidence in our hypothesis, as well as the urgency and agility needed to deliver on it. Because disease won’t wait, so neither should we. Together at Iso is about connection, collaboration across fields and catalytic relationships. It’s knowing that transformation is a group project, and remembering that what we’re doing will have a real impact on real people everywhere. Creating an extraordinary company: We believe that to be successful we need a team with a range of skills and talents. We’re building an environment where collaboration is fundamental, learning is shared and every employee feels supported and able to thrive. We value unique experiences, knowledge, backgrounds, and perspectives, and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact.