Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Machine Learning Team Lead - Foundation Models & Probabilistic AI

📍 London, UK (Hybrid) | 💰 £145,000+ & Significant Equity

🧬 AI Drug Discovery Startup | Full-time

About Us

We’re an AI-native biotech company building foundation models for biology to transform how new medicines are discovered. By combining large-scale multimodal biological datasets with probabilistic machine learning and generative AI, we’re developing systems capable of predicting complex biological behaviour at unprecedented scale.

Our mission is to create general-purpose biological intelligence that accelerates therapeutic discovery across oncology, immunology, and rare diseases.

Backed by top-tier investors and leading scientific advisors, we’ve recently secured major funding to expand our ML platform and research capabilities globally.

The Role

We’re looking for a Machine Learning Team Lead to lead a high-performing team working on foundation models and probabilistic ML systems for drug discovery.

You’ll sit at the intersection of research and engineering - driving technical direction, mentoring senior engineers and researchers, and helping scale both our platform and team as we push toward state-of-the-art biological modelling.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone excited by frontier AI, scientific impact, and building exceptional ML organisations.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Leading a team of ML engineers and applied researchers building large-scale foundation models for biological data
• Defining technical strategy across probabilistic modelling, representation learning, and generative AI systems
• Architecting scalable distributed training infrastructure for multi-billion parameter models
• Driving productionisation of research systems into robust internal discovery platforms
• Collaborating with computational biologists, cheminformaticians, and leadership on long-term research initiatives
• Establishing engineering standards, experimentation workflows, and model evaluation practices
• Mentoring and growing a world-class ML engineering team
• Helping shape hiring strategy and technical roadmap as the company scales

What We’re Looking For

Essential

• Proven experience leading ML engineering or applied research teams
• Strong background building and scaling deep learning systems in production
• Deep understanding of foundation model architectures and modern generative AI techniques
• Experience with probabilistic ML approaches such as Bayesian inference, latent variable models, or uncertainty-aware systems
• Strong software engineering and distributed systems experience
• Ability to balance research innovation with engineering execution
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills

Nice to Have

• Experience in biotech, computational biology, or AI for science
• Familiarity with molecular modelling, protein representation learning, or biological datasets
• Publications or contributions in advanced ML research
• Experience scaling ML organisations in startup environments

Why Join?

• Lead one of the most technically ambitious AI teams in biotech
• Work on frontier AI problems with direct impact on human health
• Significant ownership, autonomy, and influence over technical direction
• Competitive compensation and meaningful equity package
• Access to cutting-edge compute infrastructure and proprietary datasets
• Collaborative culture built around scientific curiosity and engineering excellence

Please apply directly through this job advert.