At Recursion, we combine experimental biology, chemistry, automation and artificial intelligence to quickly and efficiently identify treatments for diseases. We generate a wide variety of data across different biological and chemical domains, and build models off of that data. We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior AI & Automation Engineer to join the IT Engineering team. This role is focused on applying a software engineering mindset and skillset to design, build, and deploy custom AI agents and automation platforms that reduce toil and accelerate our work. You will be responsible for creating the systems that empower our teams to work faster and smarter, ensuring our technology stack can effectively support our growth in the TechBio space.
Please Note: This is a 6-month contract position.
In this role you will:- Engineer, develop, and deploy sophisticated AI agents using Python to automate complex business and scientific workflows, reduce operational toil, and accelerate key processes.
- Engineer scalable, robust platforms that serve as the foundation for AI agent development, enabling other teams to build and deploy their own automations.
- Engineer and automate critical operational tasks like configuration management, user lifecycle management, health monitoring, and reporting using scripting and modern automation tools.
- Perform deep-dive troubleshooting and root cause analysis for complex issues within our AI and automation systems, engineering permanent solutions to prevent recurrence.
- Work closely with stakeholders across departments (Finance, HR, R&D, etc.) to understand their needs, identify automation opportunities, and translate them into effective technical solutions.
- Act as a subject matter expert for our AI and automation platforms, mentor junior team members, and contribute to the enterprise application roadmap.
- A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 7+ years of experience in a software engineering role with a heavy emphasis on building automation systems.
- Expert proficiency in Python is required.
- Experience with Large Language Model (LLM) APIs and prompt engineering.
- Proven success in designing, building, and deploying AI agents, automation platforms, or complex workflow orchestration systems.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building platforms and tools for others to use.
- Deep understanding of application integration, APIs, and middleware tools to enable seamless data flow for AI agents.
- An engineering mindset with excellent troubleshooting, problem-solving, and root cause analysis skills.
- Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with business stakeholders and technical teams.
- Experience with agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen).
- Experience with OpenAI AgentKit or Agent Development Kit (ADK).
- Experience with vector databases for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
- Experience with cloud AI platforms (e.g., Vertex AI).
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi) to manage cloud resources.
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
- Knowledge of serverless architectures (e.g., AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions).
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The Values We Hope You Share:
- We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
- We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
- We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
- We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
- We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
- We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.
Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.
More About Recursion
Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to radically improve lives. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously generate one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.
Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montréal, New York, London, Oxford area, and the San Francisco Bay area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.
Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation.
Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.
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What We Do
We are a clinical-stage biotechnology company decoding biology by integrating technological innovations across biology, chemistry, automation, data science and engineering to industrialize drug discovery. We are leveraging new technology to create virtuous cycles of learning around datasets to build the next-generation biopharmaceutical company. It’s complex biology, decoded. While we are united in a common mission, Decoding Biology to Radically Improve Lives, our greatest strength lies in our differences: expertise, gender, race, disciplines, experience, and perspectives. Deliberately building and cultivating this culture is critical to achieving our audacious goals. We are proudly headquartered in Salt Lake City.
Why Work With Us
We are the leading AI/ML-driven drug discovery company, running +1.5 million experiments every week as we develop a map of human biology. This approach has created one of the largest, broadest and deepest pipelines of any technology-enabled drug discovery company.
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