Principal Software Engineer (TechOps)

About the Company

Drug discovery is traditionally slow, expensive, and has a high failure rate. This London-headquartered company is setting out to change that by treating biology as an information problem and building AI to design medicines.

The company has attracted billions in funding, which gives it the runway and the compute to tackle large-scale problems. Scientists, ML researchers and engineers work side by side here, and every one of them depends on the technology foundations underneath their work.

The Role

As Principal Software Engineer (TechOps), you will be the senior technical voice on how software is built, shipped, run and kept dependable across a company whose output is research. Your decisions will shape how quickly scientists can test an idea, how confidently engineers can release, and how smoothly large-scale experiments run.

This is a London-based role at principal level. You will set direction as well as deliver, raising the standard of engineering operations while staying close to the work.

Key Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for TechOps, deciding how the company builds, deploys and operates its software and infrastructure as it scales.
• Design and evolve reliable, secure and efficient cloud infrastructure that supports both research and production workloads.
• Build and improve CI/CD, release and automation tooling so engineers and scientists can ship safely and quickly.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code and repeatable, well-documented ways of working across teams.
• Establish strong observability, monitoring and incident practices, so problems are found early and learned from.
• Partner with ML researchers, scientists and product engineers to understand what they need and remove the friction that slows them down.
• Mentor engineers, review designs and help build a culture of operational excellence.

Essential Requirements

• Substantial experience in software engineering with a strong operations, platform or infrastructure focus, at or near principal level.
• A track record of designing and running production systems on a major cloud platform.
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and automation.
• Strong programming ability, and the habit of solving operational problems by building proper tools.
• Experience with monitoring, reliability and incident response in complex environments.
• The ability to influence technical decisions, mentor others and work comfortably with researchers and engineers alike.

Why Join

• Work on a mission with real stakes: using AI to help bring better medicines to people faster.
• Join a heavily funded company with a serious research ambition and a team to match.
• Hold a senior role where your judgement shapes the foundations everyone else builds on.
• Collaborate daily with scientists and ML researchers, and learn a field that is being rewritten as you work.
• Be based in London, at the heart of the company.

If this sounds like the kind of problem you would like to spend the next few years on, drop me a line for a confidential chat. I would be glad to share more about the team, the scope of the role and what the company is building, with no pressure either way.