Senior AI Platform Engineer

About Us

Exscientia is an AI-driven precision medicine company committed to discovering, designing and developing the best possible drugs in the fastest and most effective manner. Exscientia developed the first-ever functional precision oncology platform to successfully guide treatment selection and improve patient outcomes in a prospective interventional clinical study, as well as to progress AI-designed small molecules into the clinical setting.

Our internal pipeline is focused on leveraging our precision medicine platform in oncology, while our partnered pipeline broadens our approach to other therapeutic areas. By pioneering a new approach to medicine creation, we believe the best ideas of science can rapidly become the best medicines for patients.

The Role

We’re seeking a Senior AI Platform Engineer to contribute to our mission to develop better medicines, faster, to people around the world through building and supporting systems that will accelerate and improve the process for drug discovery. To deliver this mission, you will help to maintain, develop, and enhance our engineering processes for deploying and maintaining machine learning models in production.

You will have the opportunity to work at the forefront of precision medicine, utilising and enhancing your software engineering skills by developing cutting edge, cloud native tools which will be used by a variety of customers for trailblazing research. This would involve designing and implementing evolutions of our state-of-the-art AI platform using the latest, most advanced tools and building best-in-class automation processes.

Please note this is a hybrid role and occasional travel is required to our offices in either Oxford, UK or Dundee, UK (approximately 5 days per month), with flexibility to work from home in the UK the remaining time. We are a flexible working organisation and we’re willing to consider other options which would provide similar contact time with the team.

You will have the opportunity to:

• Develop cutting edge, cloud native tools which are used by a variety of customers including internal and external researchers.
• Work at the forefront of precision medicine, using your software development skills to allow our in-house ML pipeline to shine.
• Take the lead on solving highly impactful problems and drive design decisions, taking an active role in pushing projects forward.
• Gain new knowledge of the latest novel technologies and share your expertise with others.
• Work in a collaborative and supportive agile team environment, working with a diverse range of colleagues.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including data scientists, machine learning engineers, software engineers, and DevOps engineers, to build and deploy AI/ML models and applications.

Requirements

Essential skills:

• 4+ years of overall experience as a Platform Engineer working on enterprise-level customer-facing projects, with experience leading projects or leading solutions to problems.
• Within that, 3+ years of experience in containerisation (Docker) and high proficiency in cloud computing platforms, particularly AWS services (e.g., EC2, S3, Lambda, ECS, EKS, etc).
• Experience with automation tools and frameworks (e.g., Kubernetes, Argo, etc).
• Knowledge of best practices for software development, testing, CI/CD, and DevOps principles.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, TypeScript and knowledge of frameworks such as scikit-learn, Keras, PyTorch, Tensorflow, etc.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.
  
  

Desirable skills:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Experience in building and managing AI/ML platform infrastructure in a production environment.
• Problem-solving skills, and a willingness to challenge and be challenged in technical discussions.
• Ability to understand tools used by data scientists, and experience with software development and test automation.

Benefits

• Join our inclusive, collaborative and intellectually stimulating organisation with strong company values.

• As a learning organisation, we provide access to learning and development opportunities and will place you at the forefront of your career growth at Exscientia.
• We employ brilliant people so we pay highly competitive salaries. Additionally, all our employees are eligible for a company-wide annual bonus and receive both a new joiner and annual share award.
• Enjoy our generous holiday allowance and flexible working approach to find a healthy work-life balance that works for you.
• Create amazing memories or progress your personal and professional development with our four-week paid sabbatical after four years of service.
• We’re leading the way in progressive leave, offering enhanced policies such as generous parental leave, surrogacy, menopause, and family emergency leave so you feel supported no matter the life event.
• Additionally, we support childcare costs for children aged 0-5 through our affordable childcare scheme.
• Take advantage of two generous salary exchange schemes to claim discounts on a brand new electric vehicle and cycling equipment worth up to £3,500.
• As a healthcare company, we understand the importance of health and wellbeing so we provide comprehensive private health insurance, dental and vision benefits for you and your family.
• We also provide plenty of access to mental health support including therapy and counselling sessions plus an employee assistance program for help with lifestyle issues such as bereavement, family problems or money management.
• To help safeguard the future for you and your loved ones, we also offer pension and life cover.
• Help yourself to free drinks and snacks in our fully stocked kitchens. Join your colleagues in one of our many breakout areas and get to know the people you are working with. Some of the best ideas start with a coffee break!
• Feel inspired by our state-of-the-art technology and tools which enable you to do your best work in an innovative environment.
• We’ll even support your home office environment with an allowance for furniture and equipment to make your space as comfortable and productive as possible.
• Learn more about why our team enjoy working at Exscientia here