Senior Software Engineer (LLM Engineering), London

Isomorphic Labs is applying frontier AI to help unlock deeper scientific insights, faster breakthroughs, and life-changing medicines with an ambition to solve all disease.

The future is coming. A future enabled and enriched by the incredible power of machine learning. A future in which diseases are curtailed or cured starting with better and faster drug discovery.

Come and be part of an interdisciplinary team driving groundbreaking innovation and play a meaningful role in contributing towards us achieving our ambitious goals, while being a part of an inspiring and collaborative culture.

The world we want tomorrow is the one we’re building today. It starts with the culture at this company. It starts with you.

About Iso

Isomorphic Labs (IsoLabs) was launched in 2021 to advance human health by building on and beyond the Nobel-winning AlphaFold system. Since then, our interdisciplinary team of drug discovery experts and machine learning specialists has built powerful new predictive and generative AI models that accelerate scientific discovery at digital speed.

Our name comes from the belief that there is an underlying symmetry between biology and information science. By harnessing AI’s powerful capabilities, we can use it to model complex biological phenomena to help design novel molecules, anticipate how drugs will perform and develop innovative medicines to treat and cure some of the world’s most devastating diseases.

We have built a world-leading drug design engine comprising AI models that are capable of working across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities. We are continually innovating on model architecture and developing cutting-edge capabilities to advance rational drug design.

Every day, and with each new breakthrough, we’re getting closer to the promise of digital biology, and achieving our ambitious mission to one day solve all disease with the help of AI.

Your Impact

As a member of our newly formed LLM Engineering team, you will architect, implement and own the systems that bring LLMs into the heart of our scientific and business processes. You’ll need to apply first-principles thinking and design to build robust, secure, and scalable infrastructure for generative AI, even when there’s no pre-existing blueprint. You’ll need to use your understanding of the internal mechanics of these models and the ecosystem around them to drive your technical decisions. You’ll balance user experience and solutions engineering with high-performance platform engineering, to ensure our AI tools are scalable and reliable. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to putting LLMs at the center of scientific discovery at scale!

What you will do

As a member of the LLM Engineering team, you will work on a subset of the following:

• System Architecture: Architect LLM-integrated systems by incorporating scalability, security, and user experience considerations from the earliest stages of development.
• Operational Excellence: Enable telemetry, observability, governance and cost management. Build platform components and tools for routing and making optimal use of various models.
• LLM & Agentic Infrastructure: Implement advanced context management, tool-use (MCP), skill tooling, and RAG to enhance research workflows and help scale our agentic infrastructure.
• Evaluation Frameworks: Build rigorous testing for probabilistic systems to ensure model reliability and safety. Build and maintain evals for different tasks.
• Agentic Tooling: Develop the internal frameworks and IDE integrations to leverage agentic coding and agentic workflows at scale. Contribute to shaping best practices and providing a great user experience.
• Refinement & Training: Support fine-tuning and RL efforts in collaboration with AI researchers to optimise models for complex biological and chemical data.
• Strategic Collaboration and Solutioning: Partner with researchers to translate scientific needs into technical AI specifications. Partner with other parts of the business to unlock LLM-based use-cases.

Skills and qualifications

Essential

• Software Engineering: Strong coding skills (Python) with a focus on production-grade, maintainable systems.
• System Design: Ability to architect and maintain (IaC) complex systems across multiple verticals (Security, UX, and Scalability) in the cloud.
• LLM Internals: Deep understanding of how models are trained, how they work internally, and their inherent limitations.
• LLM Serving stack: Experience with the LLM serving stack (e.g. vLLM) for open weight models for bringing the latest models to internal users.
• ML Literacy: Experience evaluating probabilistic ML systems and managing model "tool use", contexts and loops.
• First-Principles Thinking: A hype-detached approach to solving problems and selecting the right tech stack.
• Communication: Excellent stakeholder management and the ability to explain technical risks to non-experts.

Nice to have

• Applied LLM Experience: Prior success building and scaling systems centered around Large Language Models.
• ML Infrastructure: Experience setting up the underlying hardware or orchestration for ML systems.
• GCP: Prior experience building and deploying systems on Google Cloud (GCP).
• Scientific Domain: Interest or experience in biology, chemistry, or drug discovery; an interest in applying AI to scientific discovery.
• Fast-Moving Tooling: Familiarity with the latest in agentic tooling and developer frameworks.

Culture and values

We are guided by our shared values. It's not about finding people who think and act in the same way. These values help to guide our work and will continue to strengthen it.

Thoughtful
Thoughtful at Iso is about curiosity, creativity and care. It is about good people doing good, rigorous and future-making science every single day.

Brave
Brave at Iso is about fearlessness, but it’s also about initiative and integrity. The scale of the challenge demands nothing less.

Determined
Determined at Iso is the way we pursue our goal. It’s a confidence in our hypothesis, as well as the urgency and agility needed to deliver on it. Because disease won’t wait, so neither should we.

Together
Together at Iso is about connection, collaboration across fields and catalytic relationships. It’s knowing that transformation is a group project, and remembering that what we’re doing will have a real impact on real people everywhere.

Creating an extraordinary company

We believe that to be successful we need a team with a range of skills and talents. We're building an environment where collaboration is fundamental, learning is shared and every employee feels supported and able to thrive. We value unique experiences, knowledge, backgrounds, and perspectives, and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact.

We are committed to equal employment opportunities regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Hybrid working

It’s hugely important for us to share knowledge and build strong relationships with each other, and we find it easier to do this if we spend time together in person. This is why we follow a hybrid model, and would require you to be able to come into the office 3 days a week (currently Tuesday, Wednesday, and one other day depending on which team you’re in). If you have additional needs that would prevent you from following this hybrid approach, we’d be happy to talk through these if you’re selected for an initial screening call.

Please note that when you submit an application, your data will be processed in line with our privacy policy.

>> Click to view other open roles at Isomorphic Labs