Principal Software Engineer (Infrastructure), London

📋 Job Overview

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 Isomorphic Labs

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.

🎯 The Role

You will be working on our groundbreaking platform that will transform the biopharmaceutical world as we know it. You'll technically lead our Platform group, where you partner with leading engineers, scientists and ML researchers to build the critical foundations driving that transformation.

You'll be working as part of a small and highly efficient team on all parts of cloud infrastructure and software lifecycle. Reporting directly into our Director of Engineering to help manage and create stability to all cloud and infrastructure tasks around the Training and Inference Platform. 

We believe Isomorphic is best of both worlds: a dynamic startup where things happen fast with a secure Alphabet backing and a long-term vision.

We’re still at a relatively early stage in our journey, with a level of ambiguity as we continuously learn from each other, so you will need to build on your previous experience and show initiative in order to fully carve out your contribution in this newly created role.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design, operate, manage and refine research, development, and production cloud infrastructure (GCP, K8s, Docker, Terraform, Kapitan, etc.)
• Develop and manage tools and processes to enhance software development practices
• Contribute to core technical decisions (e.g. choice of tooling, infrastructure, and architectural design)
• Partner and collaborate with a diverse set of teams including science (drug discovery), research (machine learning), product, business development and operations

📌 Required Qualifications

• Strong experience with Docker, Terraform and at least one major Cloud Platform
• Strong hands-on experience managing Kubernetes clusters
• Clear understanding of Infrastructure as Code
• Extensive experience with modern DevOps (CI/CD, release management, automation)
• Experience with Helm/Kustomize/Kapitan or similar deployment tools
• Experience with Grafana/Prometheus/Splunk or similar monitoring/observability technologies
• Strong Python programming
• Ability to independently deliver solutions and work effectively in cross-functional teams

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Experience supporting machine learning cloud infrastructure
• Experience with GitHub Actions
• Strong foundations in software engineering before moving into a technical operations role
• Proficiency in identifying and mitigating security risks

🎁 Benefits

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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.