Senior Scientific Software Engineer

Recursion; Stroude; Hybrid; GBP 75,000 - 102,000; Full time

Job summary

A clinical-stage TechBio company in the UK is looking for a talented individual to develop critical SAR and Chemical Registration Systems. You will work in a team focused on cutting-edge lab automation and contribute significantly to the company's drug discovery efforts. A degree in Biology or Chemistry, alongside programming proficiency, is required. The role is office-based with a hybrid work model, offering a competitive salary between £75,900 and £101,900 plus bonuses.

Benefits

Annual bonus

Equity compensation

Comprehensive benefits package

Qualifications

• Experience processing SAR and/or chemical structures from datasets.
• Degree in Biology, Chemistry, Biochemistry, or related field.
• Proficient in a commonly used programming language.

Responsibilities

• Develop essential SAR and chemical registration systems.
• Work on automation systems for automated labs.

Skills

Experience building systems for SAR

Proficiency in Python, Java, or C#

Experience with agentic coding tools

Proficiency in SQL

Education

Degree in Biology, Chemistry or related field

Job description

Your work will change lives. Including your own.

The Impact You’ll Make

• Build and maintain core SAR (Structure Activity Relationship) and Chemical Registration Systems. You will be joining a multi‑disciplinary team of software engineers, automation scientists, and data managers who are responsible for building and maintaining critical SAR and Chemical Registration Systems that underpin all discovery efforts at Recursion.
• Turn automated drug discovery into a reality. As part of this team you will work with cutting‑edge automation scientists on the development of novel automation and agentic control systems to drive our unique DMTL lab located in the heart of Oxfordshire.
• Share your knowledge broadly. You will work closely with colleagues in our Salt Lake City labs, sharing knowledge and experience in both directions as we push the bounds of lab automation at both facilities.

In this role, you will:

• Contribute to the development of essential SAR and chemical registration systems.
• Work on the cutting edge of lab automation systems by building automatic and agentic control systems for our start‑of‑the‑art automated labs in Milton Park.

The Team You’ll Join

You will be joining the UK DMTL engineering team. The team is responsible for building and operating our global SAR and chemical registration systems that form our Centaur Register product, as well as the user‑facing component of our small‑molecule design product – Centaur Chemist. The team is also building a unique control system for our DMTL labs located in Milton Park to drive our efforts to automate the DMTL loop.

The Experience You’ll Need

• Experience building systems to process SAR and/or chemical structures from either public or private datasets (professional experience and/or PhD‑level experience will be considered).
• Degree in Biology / Chemistry or related field (e.g., Biochemistry, molecular biology, etc.).
• Proficiency in a commonly used programming language (e.g., Python, Java, C#, etc.).
• Proven experience accelerating software delivery via the use of agentic coding tools.
• SQL experience is desirable.

We are particularly interested in candidates that have recently transitioned from a career as a wet‑lab scientist to one more focused on software engineering and informatics.

Working Location & Compensation:

This is an office‑based, hybrid position at our office in Milton Park, England. Employees are expected to work in the office at least 50% of the time.

Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is £75,900 to £101,900. You will also be eligible for an annual bonus and equity compensation, as well as a comprehensive benefits package.

The Values We Hope You Share

• We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
• We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect—showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
• We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
• We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
• We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
• We are One Recursion. True cross‑functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.

Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.

More About Recursion

Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical‑stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to radically improve lives. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously generates one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine‑learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet‑lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world — Recursion is uniting technology, biology, and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life‑sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montréal, New York, London, Oxford area, and the San Francisco Bay area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation.

Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.