Research Engineer - Lab Brains & Scientific Workflows (12 months FTC)

The Methodist Church in Britain; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

27 days annual leave

Private medical cover

Group life assurance

Employee assistance programme

Enhanced leave pay

Pension with employer contributions

Season ticket loan

Hybrid working

Job summary

UK DRI Research Operations Division seeks a Research Engineer to design and deploy Lab Brains, agents and connected tools for dementia research workflows. You will work with researchers and lab staff to turn recurring problems into reproducible software, linking notes, conversations and experimental records with code and data.

The role emphasizes hands-on software development, guidance on best practices, and delivering tools with clear support ownership.

Qualifications

• No degree required if equivalent capability demonstrated.
• Shipping software that others use.
• Experience building LLM apps or automation, including tool integration, evaluation and debugging.
• Experience connecting systems and handling authentication, data access, change management and failures.

Responsibilities

• Develop Lab Brains agents and tools to help labs track history and next actions.
• Collaborate with researchers and lab staff to turn problems into usable software.
• Create workflows linking notebooks, Slack, Linear, and Labstep with code,data and docs.
• Build robust integrations handling permissions, retries and failures with minimal manual records.
• Implement interfaces and controls showing data provenance and sharing scope.
• Release tools across labs with documentation and clear ownership.

Skills

Programming ability

Git & GitHub

Automated testing

CI/CD

Documentation

Tools

Labstep integration

Job description

This 12-month fixed-term Research Engineer post sits in the UK DRI Research Operations Division and builds Lab Brains, agents and connected tools that help dementia laboratories understand their work and act on next steps. Core work is hands‑on software development, piloting tools with lab staff and turning their recurring problems into software they choose to use. It is a technical leadership role within the Institute‑wide AI initiative, working as a peer to a scientific knowledge engineer. Visa sponsorship is not offered.

What the job involves

• Build Lab Brains agents and connected tools that help labs understand their work, recover its history and follow through on next steps
• Work directly with researchers, technicians and lab managers to turn recurring problems into software they choose to use
• Build workflows linking meeting notes, approved Slack conversations, Linear projects and Labstep experimental records, with links to code, data and documents
• Build agents that recover experimental history, preserve decisions and negative or inconclusive results, identify missing context and propose follow‑up for approval
• Build reusable integrations that handle changing records, permissions, retries and failures without extra manual record‑keeping
• Build interfaces and review controls that show where an answer came from, allow correction and let users choose what is shared beyond their lab
• Create a tested route for distributing tools across participating labs, with documentation, dependable releases and clear support ownership
• Compare existing agents, scientific software and commercial tools on real workflows and develop an adoption strategy for the Institute
• Champion these agents to senior management, revisit them as the ecosystem changes and advise what to extend, change or stop
• Work with the Scientific Knowledge & Field Building engineer to connect authorised lab knowledge to wider scientific questions and return requests or opportunities to labs
• Treat reproducibility as part of the product by preserving versions, methods, code and evidence needed to inspect or repeat an analysis
• Evaluate task completion, source accuracy, net time saved, recurring use, running costs and failure modes, keeping mistakes and rejected suggestions visible

Qualifications

• No degree or PhD needed where equivalent capability is shown

Experience

• Evidence of shipping software that other people use
• Practical experience building LLM applications or comparable intelligent automation, including tool or API integration, evaluation and debugging
• Experience connecting systems and handling authentication, data access, changing records and operational failures

Skills & knowledge

• Strong programming ability, with the ability to learn the languages and tools the codebase needs
• Sound software engineering practice: Git with GitHub or equivalent, code review, automated testing, continuous integration, documentation, packaging, dependency management and maintainable releases
• Product judgement to find a useful problem with users, choose a manageable first version and improve it from feedback
• Commitment to reproducible science and collaborative software development, shown through work others can inspect, run or improve
• Enthusiasm and ability to influence how an organisation drives change through technology adoption
• Ability to work autonomously and lead, setting priorities, justifying decisions, bringing others along and owning outcomes

Nice to have

• Research software or scientific computing experience
• Laboratory workflow experience
• Developer tools or open‑source package experience
• Electronic lab notebook or task system experience

What’s offered

• 27 days annual leave plus bank holidays, and up to 6 business closure days each year
• Single private medical cover, plus income protection and critical illness cover
• Group life assurance up to 4x base salary
• Employee assistance programme
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, neonatal and adoption pay
• Pension with 6.1% employee and 15.9% employer contributions
• Interest‑free season ticket loan and voluntary benefits discounts
• Hybrid working, with up to 1-2 days a week remote