Lead of Foundations, London

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.

 

Lead of Foundations, London 

 

Your impact 

Reporting directly to the Head of Engineering, you will be responsible for the strategic direction, execution, and operational excellence of our Platform teams, which are enabling training and serving of the largest foundations models in biotech. These teams include Technical Infrastructure, Machine Learning Platform, Site Reliability team and Developer Experience for Research. This is a highly influential role that requires a blend of deep technical expertise, strong leadership capabilities, and a passion for fostering a high-performance engineering culture. Your work has the potential to accelerate cutting edge research in the drug design space.

 

What you will do

• Define and execute the long-term vision and strategy for our foundational infrastructure, aligning with company goals and anticipating future needs.

• Lead, mentor, and inspire a diverse team of engineering managers and individual contributors across multiple disciplines (ML Platform, Tech Infrastructure, SRE). Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, continuous learning, and accountability.

• Oversee the development and evolution of our core platform, ensuring it provides robust, scalable, and developer-friendly services for all engineering teams. This includes aspects like service mesh, container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and internal tooling.

• Lead the teams responsible for building and maintaining the underlying systems that power our user-facing applications, focusing on performance, reliability, and seamless user experiences.

• Guide the development and operation of the infrastructure supporting our prediction models, ensuring high availability, low latency, and efficient data processing for machine learning initiatives.

• Drive the strategy and execution for our core technical infrastructure, including networking, compute, storage, and data centers (on-prem and/or cloud). Optimize for cost, performance, and security.

• Champion and embed SRE principles across the organization. Oversee the SRE team responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our critical systems through proactive monitoring, incident management, and automation.

• Establish and enforce best practices for infrastructure operations, including monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and security. Drive continuous improvement in system stability and uptime.

• Partner closely with product engineering teams, security, data science, and other stakeholders to understand their needs and deliver foundational solutions that accelerate product development and innovation.

• Evaluate and manage relationships with key internal partners to ensure optimal value and performance.

• Manage the budget for the Foundations Engineering organization, optimizing resource allocation and identifying cost-saving opportunities.

 

Skills and qualifications 

Essential:

• Experience in software engineering, with a significant portion focused on ML infrastructure, platform, or site reliability engineering.
• Demonstrated experience in a leadership role, managing multiple engineering teams and managers.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP), and modern infrastructure technologies.
• Proven experience with running horizontal Platform Engineering teams
• Strong background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles and practices, including incident management, observability, performance optimization, and automation.
• Familiarity with data infrastructure and systems supporting machine learning/prediction models.
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to attract, hire, retain, and develop top engineering talent.
• Strategic thinker with a proven ability to define and execute complex technical roadmaps.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a data-driven approach to decision-making.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Nice to have: 

• Experience in a high-growth, fast-paced environment.
• Experience building and scaling infrastructure for Biotech, Life science ADD

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.

>> Click to view other open roles at Isomorphic Labs