Bioinformatics Engineer, London
Isomorphic Labs · London, United Kingdom · 2mo ago
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 Iso
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.
Your impact
You will collaborate to build a high-fidelity biological data layer that serves as the foundation for machine learning at Isomorphic Labs. Moving beyond raw data ingestion to create curated biological datasets, you will ensure model training is consistently grounded in high-quality, standardized, and version-controlled biological data. Harmonizing disparate public datasets and internal data into a coherent representation, you will unlock the information needed to fuel our mission to solve all disease.
Working in an interdisciplinary environment, you will partner with ML Research, Computational Biology, Drug Development, and Chemistry teams to drive the adoption of standardized bioinformatics primitives and best practices into their daily workflows. Your work will provide projects with a significant head start by solving complex bioinformatics problems at the platform level. Ultimately, your contribution ensures that our models are built on a robust and integrated data resource, producing predictions on a coherent view of biology, directly accelerating our Drug Discovery programs.
What you will do
- Develop and operate large-scale bioinformatics pipelines for high-throughput data analysis, ensuring reliable processing from raw data (e.g., FASTQ, BAM, mzXML) to ML-ready datasets.
- Apply bioinformatics best practices to the ingestion and harmonization of complex datasets, ensuring model training is grounded in high-quality, version-controlled biological data, and coherently integrated datasets.
- Harmonise disparate public databases (e.g., Ensembl, UniProt, Reactome, Open Targets), implementing rigorous versioning and mapping strategies to mitigate identifier collisions, data loss, and semantic drift across releases.
- Act as a strategic partner to our ML Research, Computational Biology, Drug Development, and Chemistry teams, championing the adoption of the internal bioinformatics platform and standardized biological data primitives into their daily research workflows.
- Participate in research projects as a "Deployed Engineer", providing customised solutions, and identifying technical gaps, while ensuring project-specific insights are contributed back into the core bioinformatics platform.
- Provide documentation, guidance, and training on data resources and curation processes to the wider organization.
Skills and qualifications
Essential:
- Proven experience with the large-scale processing of raw bioinformatics data (e.g., FASTQ, BAM, mzXML).
- A demonstrable track record of delivering high-quality bioinformatics outputs across varied modalities (e.g., genomics, proteomics, functional genomics, systems biology, single cell).
- Experience delivering bioinformatics solutions directly to research teams, scientific communities, or industry projects, with a strong focus on user enablement.
- Experience writing production-grade code in Python and developing automated, scalable bioinformatics pipelines.
- PhD or MSc in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience in a biopharmaceutical or research environment.
Nice to have:
- Experience with domain-specific workflow systems (e.g., Nextflow) for scaling high-throughput pipeline execution.
- Familiarity with general-purpose data orchestration and processing frameworks (e.g., Dagster, Apache Beam) for integrating research pipelines into a production platform
- Familiarity with building and maintaining bioinformatics infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Familiarity with modern, high-performance DataFrame libraries (e.g., Polars), and relational data modeling and analysis (SQL).
- Exposure to machine learning concepts and the specific data requirements for training ML models.
- Demonstrable experience working with regulated PHI data.
- Extensive experience in software development with Python.
Culture and values
We are guided by our shared values. It's not about finding people who think and act in the same way. These values help to guide our work and will continue to strengthen it.
Thoughtful
Thoughtful at Iso is about curiosity, creativity and care. It is about good people doing good, rigorous and future-making science every single day.
Brave
Brave at Iso is about fearlessness, but it’s also about initiative and integrity. The scale of the challenge demands nothing less.
Determined
Determined at Iso is the way we pursue our goal. It’s a confidence in our hypothesis, as well as the urgency and agility needed to deliver on it. Because disease won’t wait, so neither should we.
Together
Together at Iso is about connection, collaboration across fields and catalytic relationships. It’s knowing that transformation is a group project, and remembering that what we’re doing will have a real impact on real people everywhere.
Creating an extraordinary company
We believe that to be successful we need a team with a range of skills and talents. We're building an environment where collaboration is fundamental, learning is shared and every employee feels supported and able to thrive. We value unique experiences, knowledge, backgrounds, and perspectives, and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact.
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.
Hybrid working
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.
Please note that when you submit an application, your data will be processed in line with our privacy policy.