Senior Backend Engineer

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Company

Bactobio is a young London-based biotechnology company. We use breakthrough technologies in synthetic biology, next-generation sequencing, and machine learning to cultivate the 99% previously unculturable microbes. These microbes constitute the biggest bioresource in life, and our exclusive access allows us to discover novel chemicals that can be applied across a variety of markets.

We are impact-driven. Our first goal is to solve the growing antimicrobial resistance crisis through novel antibiotics and stabilise global food security through novel natural biodegradable fungicides.

Role & Team:

• Software is critical to our scientific endeavours. You'll join the growing software team that builds and enhances the application and infrastructure used by our scientists to accelerate their search for novel compounds.
• The application gives the lab scientists a holistic view of the scientific pipeline, ensuring that data is captured, processed and visualized in a way that optimises the flow of scientific samples from team to team.
• Work closely with dozens of world-class lab scientists, bioinformaticians, data scientists, and robot automation engineers, turning their requirements for research functionality into user-friendly features.
• Our stack is Python 3, SQLAlchemy, FastAPI, RQ, MySQL with a frontend in Remix, React, TypeScript, CSS Modules with OpenAPI-based API client generation for TypeScript.
• We emphasize code quality, employing reviews on top of static analysis tools (pyright, ruff, ruff format) with plenty of tests in place to maintain a high-quality codebase.

Responsibilities:

• Delivering reliable, tested, typed, clean Python code to improve our application
• Modelling our scientific domain in code
• Working alongside subject-matter experts and quickly absorbing their knowledge of our scientific pipeline
• Optimising the infrastructure that we run our application & scientific pipelines on
• Communicating well in cross-functional teams alongside bioinformaticians and data scientists to ensure that our backend aligns with business priorities
• Having a very user-focused way of approaching problems
• Thinking about how the backend work impacts our users on the frontend and evaluating different approaches based on what's best for the user
• Giving input on the architecture of new and existing projects
• Advising on current trends and best practices in backend architecture (performance, accessibility, security and usability)
• Shipping work at a fast pace, where you can make change happen in days, not months

We would love you to have experience with some of the tools we use, but it's not a requirement. Instead, we're eager for you to have the desire to learn and develop yourself. So at a minimum, we would be looking for you to demonstrate proven experience in working in a modern tech stack using Python and, ideally, SQLAlchemy or Django.

If you are passionate about delivering code, and you love solving complex problems and working in a team with a strong sense of mission is something you crave, then we would love to talk to you.

Benefits include:

• Competitive starting salary
• The chance to be part of a fun, multicultural, kind, and ambitious crowd that are impact-driven
• Daily access to academic leaders, business leaders, and unicorn founders
• Brand new, modern labs in Central London with dedicated office space, large balconies and 360' views of the London skyline
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays
• Enhanced Sick Pay
• Flexible start and finish times within the company's core hours to fit your preferences (within core hours 10am -4pm)
• Diverse team of colleagues (check out our website to meet us)
• Weekly team activities including board games, sports activities, and socials on Fridays
• Complimentary snacks, fruits, tea, coffee, soft drinks,...
• Access to 1000s of training courses through Udemy, with an allowance for both personal development and work-related training
• Bike2Work scheme
• Employee Assistance Programme offering structured counselling, life and career coaching, legal and financial advise