Scientific Software Engineer for Autonomous Labs

Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford; Oxford; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Enhanced holiday pay

Pension

Life Assurance

Income Protection

Private Medical Insurance

Hospital Cash Plan

Therapy Services

Perk Box

Electric Car Scheme

Job summary

The Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford is seeking a Scientific Software Engineer to build software for autonomous laboratories. You will join the AI and Robotics Institute, collaborating with software, mechanical, electrical, robotics, and biology researchers to turn tacit lab knowledge into reliable software.

You will design data models, verify results, and validate runs against manual baselines. The role involves hands-on lab work in Oxford four to five days per week and strong

Qualifications

• Strong professional Python, with code that other people have depended on and maintained, and familiarity with testing, version control, and code review as normal parts of your work.
• Sound software engineering judgement, including sensible structure and separation of concerns, awareness of common design patterns and when they help, and the ability to build something maintainable rather than a working script.
• Understanding of experimental design, controls, and what it takes to establish that a result is real.
• Experience with scientific data handling, including the practicalities of instrument output, file formats, metadata, and keeping analyses reproducible.
• Comfort working with ambiguity, in an R&D setting where requirements are discovered through building.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work between scientific and engineering audiences and translate in both directions.
• Desirable: Hands-on wet lab experience in molecular biology, biochemistry, chemistry, or related discipline.
• Desirable: Experience with laboratory automation, liquid handlers, plate-based workflows, or integrated systems.

Responsibilities

• Capture the scientific knowledge behind manual protocols and encode it into automated workflows, working with the scientists who developed them to surface the undocumented decisions, tolerances, and judgement calls that determine whether a run succeeds.
• Define what needs to be sensed, measured, or checked for an automated run to be trusted, and build the verification and quality control steps that catch a failed run early rather than at the end.
• Design data models and pipelines for experimental data, sample tracking, and provenance, so that results are traceable from raw instrument output back to the protocol version and physical sample that produced them.
• Build interfaces for scientists, ranging from protocol definition formats and CLI tooling to web UIs and dashboards, chosen to fit how people actually work rather than what is quickest to ship.
• Validate automated protocols against manual baselines, designing the comparisons and controls that establish whether the automated version is genuinely equivalent.
• Develop and maintain integrations with laboratory hardware, covering liquid handlers, incubators, imagers, and plate readers, working from vendor SDKs and occasionally sparse documentation.
• Contribute to the orchestration and execution layer that schedules and runs work across the platform, with support from the wider team on the parts of that stack you have not built before.
• Act as the scientific voice within the engineering team, reviewing designs for whether they respect the constraints of the biology, and explaining engineering limitations back to the scientists in terms they can work with.
• Build and extend internal Python libraries and services, with attention to clear interfaces, testability, and the ability to simulate hardware so that logic can be developed without occupying the lab.
• Support commissioning and debugging in the lab, since a meaningful share of problems in this domain only appear when the hardware is moving and the biology is live.
• Contribute to engineering practice across the team, covering code review, CI, testing, and documentation.

Skills

Python

Software engineering

Lab automation

Data modeling

Communication

Biology collaboration

AI integration

Tools

Vendor SDKs

Job description

The Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford is seeking a Scientific Software Engineer to build software for autonomous laboratories. You will join the AI and Robotics Institute, collaborating with software, mechanical, electrical, robotics, and biology researchers to turn tacit lab knowledge into reliable software.

You will design data models, verify results, and validate runs against manual baselines. The role involves hands-on lab work in Oxford four to five days per week and strong