Senior Research Scientist

NIF; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Impactful mission

Collaborative culture

High growth

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Basecamp Research in London is seeking a Senior Research Scientist to advance core ML problems behind biological foundation models, from architecture to evaluation and deployment. You’ll join a small, frontier-focused team training billion-parameter models on massive metagenomic data, pushing math boundaries, developing new methods, and translating insights into novel biology that can impact patients.

You will report to the Head of AI Research, collaborating with genomics, sequence modeling, and

Qualifications

• PhD in computer science, mathematics, physics, or related quantitative field.
• Strong publication record at top ML venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or equivalent).
• Experience with frontier research and large-scale experiments.
• Genuine curiosity about biology and data from unexplored ecosystems.

Responsibilities

• Shape a research direction within the team and publish at top venues.
• Develop methods for billion-parameter foundation models.
• Collaborate across genomics, sequence modeling, and large-scale deep learning.
• Translate research into deployed models and practical biology insights.

Skills

Frontier research

Publication track record

AI/ML research

Cross-disciplinary collaboration

Curiosity about biology

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

PhD in quantitative field

Job description

About Us

Basecamp Research is building frontier AI for therapeutic design. We believe the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself, and we design the models and the medicines to teach it how.

Our EDEN models are trained on BaseData, the world's largest proprietary genomic dataset, with over 10B genes collected through partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents. This gives our AI models access to genetic diversity that doesn't exist in public databases, and enables EDEN to design cell and gene therapies, enzymes, and peptides directly from information about a disease. Our pipeline of EDEN-designed therapeutics, beginning with in vivo cell therapy, is advancing towards clinical development.

In September 2026 we closed an oversubscribed $140M Series C led by S32, with participation from NVIDIA, Anthropic's Anthology Fund, Catalio, European Tech Collective, Firebrand River Capital, King Philanthropies, NATO Innovation Fund, NVentures (NVIDIA's venture arm), Redalpine, Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI and True Ventures. We have offices and labs in London and Boston, we partner with biopharma companies and academic institutions worldwide, and our work has been recognised by Fast Company's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Biotech, the FT-backed Sifted AI100 list of Europe's leading AI startups as well as Barclays Eagle Labs Ones to watch, AI100.

At Basecamp Research, we pride ourselves on being a lean collaborative and global team with extremely specialist and unique skills. Our biologists, engineers, ML scientists and field explorers are united by a sense of adventure and the belief that AI, biology and data, will result in new medicines for patients who have few options today.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Research Scientist to join our AI Research team in London. You will work on the core machine learning problems behind biological foundation models, from architecture and training through to evaluation and the design of genuinely novel biology.

Our research group is small, collaborative, and operates more like a frontier research lab than a typical biotech team. We train billion-parameter-scale foundation models on the world's largest metagenomic dataset, comprising tens of trillions of tokens. We look for people who can push the mathematical boundaries of what these models can learn and represent. The work requires developing new methods and theories from scratch.

This is a role with real ownership. You will shape a research direction within the team, publish at top venues, and see your work translated into models that generate genuinely novel biology. The problems are hard, the data is unique, and the impact is tangible.

You'll be reporting to the Head of AI Research and working alongside researchers covering genomics, sequence modeling, and large-scale deep learning, as well as computational biologists, bioinformaticians, and engineers across the wider company.

About You

PhD in computer science, mathematics, physics, or a closely related quantitative field. Your work in AI is driven by curiosity, and you've built a track record of research that others have found worth building on.

You have spent meaningful time on frontier research and you already have an understanding of how top research teams operate, from problem selection to large-scale experimentation to shipping results that matter.

Your research interests might span representation learning, generative modeling, sequence and structure models, multimodal learning, training and inference at scale, reinforcement learning, or evaluation and interpretability. What matters most is that you pick important problems and go after them with rigor.

You have a strong publication record at top ML venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or equivalent) that demonstrates independent thinking and a coherent research arc.

You are genuinely curious about biology. Domain expertise is welcome, and what we really care about is that you find it exciting to work with data from unexplored ecosystems encoding billions of years of evolutionary optimization. The best candidates will see biological data as a source of fundamentally new scientific questions.

You put the team first, have strong collaborative instincts, and a startup mentality. You are comfortable with ambiguity, willing to iterate fast, and happy to work in a small team where everyone contributes across boundaries.

Nice to Have

Experience training models at large scale (billions of parameters, extreme long context, distributed training, custom architectures).

Domain knowledge in life sciences, genomics, or computational biology, e.g., familiarity with protein structure, molecular dynamics, or related biophysical methods.

Experience taking research models into production.

What we offer in return

• Impactful Mission: This is a rare chance to do work that genuinely matters. You'll join a talented, fast-moving team, access unique biological datasets at scale, and see your contributions shape real breakthroughs in AI and curative therapeutics..

• Collaborative Culture: You'll be surrounded by world‑class engineers, scientists, and researchers who care deeply about their work and about each other. With offices in London and Boston, we've built a flexible, cross‑functional environment where personal development and real ownership aren't just talking points.

• High Growth: We truly believe in investing our people we make coaching available to team members during steep growth journeys and we have twice yearly promotion opportunities. People who are really successful here own it and go directly to solve problems at pace and we ensure reward increases with impact.

• Comprehensive Benefits: We've built a benefits package people value. That means competitive salary, equity, private healthcare with no medical history exclusions so strong that means most employees' family members opt in to our plan over their own. We also offer Carrot Fertility with IVF stipend, salary sacrifice pension, bike to work scheme, life insurance, and more.

We are committed to equal opportunity employment regardless of ethnic or national origin, race, religion, sex, age, citizenship, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, gender identity or any other basis. If you have a disability or additional need that needs accommodating do let us know.