Senior AI Engineer
About Ignota Labs
Ignota Labs is a multi-award-winning drug turnaround company tackling one of the industry’s biggest bottlenecks: drug safety. Through cutting-edge explainable AI, we identify and resolve toxicity issues in promising drug candidates, unlocking their potential to become safe, effective therapies.
At Ignota Labs, you’ll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI, real-world drug development and business innovation. Our mission is ambitious, and we’re building a team of equally ambitious, experienced and forward-thinking experts who are excited by the opportunities recent innovations in AI and technology can bring. This is not just relevant for drug development but also for running an organisation in a more efficient way, allowing experts to automate the small, repetitive tasks and become 10 times more productive.
Ignota Labs are venture capital backed and have recently closed a substantial seed round with leading Silicon Valley investors.
About the role
As a Senior AI Engineer at Ignota Labs, you will design and build the agentic systems, LLM-powered tools, and cloud infrastructure that will help our scientists identify failed drugs and bring them safely to patients. Your systems will augment and assist human experts at all stages of our business, from identifying high-potential drug programmes to helping to validate new chemistry.
Joining Ignota Labs at this stage will give you the ability to have an outsized impact on our efforts to automate some of the knowledge work that goes into drug discovery and development. With each successfully rescued drug, you will have made a direct contribution to bringing medicines to patients who otherwise would not have had access to them.
Requirements
What Makes This Role Unique
Applied: The tools you build will directly enable research that has a tangible path to patient impact.
Multi-disciplinary: You’ll work closely with scientists, ML researchers, and engineers, gaining insight into the end-to-end drug discovery and development process.
Dynamic: Ignota is a fast-paced, startup environment — every week will bring new challenges and opportunities to learn.
Innovative: You’ll work with state-of-the-art AI models and services, deploying them in creative ways to solve complex, real-world R&D problems.
What You’ll Do
- Design the and build orchestration architecture for multi-modal drug redevelopment workflows.
- Collaborate with ML researchers to prototype and deploy experimental models into usable tools.
- Build automation and agentic systems to streamline literature review, data extraction, and target identification.
- Work with scientists to ensure tools are robust, reproducible, and easy to use.
- Continuously improve development, testing, and deployment processes.
Who You Are
Mission-oriented: You want your engineering work to accelerate life-changing scientific research.
Fast learner: You can quickly absorb new technologies, APIs, and scientific concepts.
Collaborative: You work effectively with interdisciplinary teams, adapting your communication for technical and non-technical audiences.
Curious & versatile: You enjoy working across domains and connecting ideas between them.
What You’ll Bring
A strong candidate will have most of the following attributes:
- Strong Python development experience, writing production-quality, maintainable code.
- Experience integrating and orchestrating AI/LLM services via APIs and related tooling.
- Experience with agent frameworks such as Pydantic AI, Langgraph, or Crew AI.
- Experience leading and managing technical teams.
- Experience running and evaluating agentic systems in production.
- Strong technical communication skills.
- Ability to rapidly prototype and iterate quickly based on feedback.
- Comfortable taking high-level research goals and turning them into working solutions.
- Familiarity with at least one cloud platform, ideally GCP.
Benefits
What We Offer
- A competitive salary (c. £70-90K depending on experience), performance-based bonus, pension, and equity in a high-growth startup.
- Opportunities for rapid career growth and progression as we scale.
- A collaborative, flexible, hybrid working environment. We have offices in Cambridge with remote options and tools to support seamless communication.
- Vitality health insurance, including mental health, dental, and optical care.
- The chance to bring potentially life-saving drugs back to patients - helping improve the lives of millions.
We regret that we cannot support visa applications for this role.