Senior ML Research Engineer

Outpost Bio; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Private medical and dental (Bupa)

Pension plan 3% employer contribution

Life insurance & income protection

Cycle to Work scheme

25 days holiday + holidays

Job summary

Outpost Bio is hiring a Senior ML Research Engineer to develop models and research infrastructure for multi-omic datasets, turning complex data into reliable insights. You will own research questions from hypothesis to publication-worthy evaluation, building reproducible training and inference systems for fast, trusted results.

London or Boston-based role with flexible work arrangements. Collaborate across biology and data teams, publish work in leading journals and ML conferences, and

Qualifications

• PhD, publications, or equivalent evidence of independent work with deep learning fluency.
• Experience with Python software engineering best practices.
• Foundation model work: pretraining, transfer learning or fine-tuning.
• Ability to work in a cross-functional team with biologists and data/lab teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and train novel ML models for multi-omic data (metagenomics, metabolomics, 16S).
• Own research questions end to end from hypothesis to write-up.
• Set rigorous evaluation standards to distinguish real results from artifacts.
• Build reproducible infrastructure with versioned training and inference pipelines.
• Collaborate with data and lab teams and present findings in publications/conferences.

Skills

ML systems

Python programming

Collaboration

Foundation models

Education

PhD

Tools

Python

Experiment tracking

Job description

Biological data is noisy, high-dimensional, and shaped by the experimental process as much as by biology itself. We are hiring a Senior ML Research Engineer to develop the models and research infrastructure that turn our multi-omic datasets, including metagenomics, metabolomics and 16S, into reliable scientific insight.
You will own high-impact research questions from hypothesis through publication-quality evaluation, while building reproducible training and inference systems that let the team move quickly and trust its results. This role is central to translating our proprietary data and experimental capabilities into a durable scientific and product advantage.
We're hiring one person for this role, and they can be based in either London or Boston.
Here is our timeline for hiring this role:

• Now until October 19th: Accepting applications
• October 26th: Planned start for interviews

Responsibilities

• Design and train novel machine-learning models for messy multi-omic data, including metagenomics, metabolomics and 16S, grounded in a strong understanding of biological systems.
• Own research questions end to end, from hypothesis and dataset design through training, evaluation and write-up.
• Set rigorous evaluation standards, accounting for batch effects, leakage, compositional data and correlated samples, to distinguish real results from artifacts.
• Turn research into reproducible infrastructure through versioned training and inference pipelines, extensible codebases and robust experiment tracking.
• Work closely across data and lab teams to shape experiments, define data handoffs, and communicate findings through publications and presentations in leading journals and ML conferences.

Your background

• Proven track record building and shipping ML systems with a research component: PhD, publications, or equivalent evidence of independent work, with fluency in PyTorch, TensorFlow or another deep learning framework.
• Experience with software engineering best practices, preferably in Python. You write code others can read and run.
• Foundation model work: pretraining, transfer learning or fine-tuning.
• A collaborative operator. You can hold a real conversation with a biologist about experimental design, take a bioinformatician's pipeline seriously as a dependency, and explain a modeling decision to people who don't build models. You've worked in a small cross-functional team.
• Comfort in a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment where you define your own problem.
• Nice to have: omics, sequencing or molecular data; representation learning over sequences, graphs or chemical structures; small-n, high-dimensional or noisy real-world data, from biology, health or another domain where the data doesn't behave; generative models for molecules or biological sequences; cloud training infrastructure and GPU orchestration.

Why Join Outpost Bio?

• You'll own real equity in what you build. We offer meaningful stock options because we believe the people building this company should share in what it becomes. We want teammates who think like owners, and we structure compensation to reflect that.
• Outstanding benefits. Private medical and dental with Bupa from day one, paid by Outpost, and dependents covered at 50%. Pension with a 3% employer contribution. Life insurance, income protection and critical illness cover, all employer paid. Cycle to Work scheme. 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, your birthday off, and a paid winter break between Christmas Eve and New Year.
• An ML Lab-in-the-Loop. Your work feeds directly into Outpost's AI platform, and the platform feeds back into the next experiment. The loop between the wet lab, the data and the models runs in days, not years, and you'll iterate inside it whichever side you sit on.
• How we work. Expected in the office Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with flexible hours around a 10am to 4pm core and up to two weeks a year working from anywhere. Home office stipend and company computer. We cover conference costs and want you presenting your work, and every quarter you get a budget for drinks or coffee to learn from peers at other companies.
• Small team, outsized reach. You're joining a small founding team backed by top-tier investors with deep connections across AI and bio. The science you do here will directly shape how pharma and consumer companies understand molecule and microbiome interactions.