Software Lead

Job Summary

Join EIT to lead the team developing software platforms that bring together scientific workflows, AI capabilities, robotics, and laboratory automation. 

This role combines team leadership with substantial hands-on engineering. You will set technical direction, organise delivery, and develop your team while personally designing systems, writing production code, and resolving complex integration problems. You will be accountable for the team’s delivery and engineering quality alongside owning significant technical work yourself. 

Working with scientists, product teams, hardware engineers, and AI specialists, you will turn emerging requirements and prototypes into reliable, usable platforms. You will bring strong software engineering experience and practical knowledge of agentic AI, including tool use, context management, orchestration, and evaluation. 

We welcome experience from scientific software, industrial automation, robotics, AI platforms, and related fields. Previous laboratory automation experience is valuable but is not essential. 

You are expected to work in Oxford 4 days a week for this role.

Key Responsibilities 

• Lead and develop the core software team, setting priorities, delegating effectively, providing feedback, and supporting recruitment and professional development. 

• Own platform delivery, translating product needs into achievable plans and managing capacity, dependencies, and technical risks. 

• Personally design, implement, test, and deploy substantial software capabilities, remaining closely involved in integration and operational troubleshooting. 

• Set technical direction and define modular architectures, shared interfaces, and reusable components across the platform. 

• Guide and contribute to agentic capabilities, including tool integration, context and state management, orchestration, and evaluation. 

• Establish appropriate boundaries between AI-driven decisions, deterministic execution, human oversight, and actions affecting physical systems. 

• Develop distributed services, communications middleware, APIs, and integrations with equipment and external platforms. 

• Take prototypes into supported operation, addressing reliability, security, performance, maintainability, and usability. 

• Lead verification and validation through automated testing, simulation, agent evaluation, and system testing, with clear acceptance criteria. 

• Establish effective code review, deployment, observability, and documentation practices, coordinating with infrastructure, data, and application teams. 

Essential Knowledge, Skills, and Experience 

• Degree or equivalent practical experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, or a related discipline. 

• Experience leading a software engineering team, including planning, delegation, mentoring, and individual development. 

• Strong, current hands-on development skills, including Python, service APIs, typed interfaces, and AI-integrated systems, with evidence of personally delivering substantial software into operational use. 

• Experience combining team leadership with sustained contribution to architecture, coding, testing, debugging, and deployment. 

• Experience delivering software platforms or complex integrated systems through deployment and ongoing operation. 

• Practical knowledge of agentic AI systems, including tool use, context management, orchestration, evaluation, and controlled interaction with external systems. 

• Experience with communications middleware and message-based or publish-subscribe architectures. 

• Understanding of asynchronous execution, concurrency, persistence, and recovery from partial failures, including message delivery, retries, and idempotency. 

• Experience applying software verification and validation, supported by clear requirements, acceptance criteria, and test evidence. 

• Ability to balance delivery priorities with engineering quality and communicate effectively across technical and non-technical teams. 

Desirable Knowledge, Skills, and Experience 

• Experience deploying AI-enabled or agentic capabilities, including familiarity with agent frameworks, MCP, retrieval, or model serving. 

• Experience with systems integrating with or directly controlling robotics, industrial automation, instrumentation, or software controlling physical equipment. 

• Familiarity with robotic simulators for integration testing and evaluating control, autonomy, and system behaviour before hardware deployment. 

• Familiarity with robotics or industrial middleware, such as ROS 2, DDS, or comparable frameworks. 

• Experience with workflow engines, scheduling, planning, or shared-resource coordination. 

• Experience with containerised cloud and edge deployments, C++, or scientific data provenance. 

• Experience developing shared platforms for multiple teams and recruiting engineers. 

Key Attributes 

• Leads by example while enabling others through thoughtful delegation and constructive feedback. 

• Takes ownership of both personal engineering work and the team’s collective delivery. 

• Moves comfortably between technical leadership and detailed implementation. 

• Collaborative, pragmatic, and comfortable turning evolving requirements into dependable systems. 

We offer the following salary and benefits:

Enhanced holiday pay

Pension

Life Assurance

Income Protection

Private Medical Insurance

Hospital Cash Plan

Therapy Services

Perk Box

Electric Car Scheme

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Why work for EIT:

At the Ellison Institute, we believe a collaborative, inclusive team is key to our success. We are building a supportive environment where creative risks are encouraged, and everyone feels heard. Valuing emotional intelligence, empathy, respect, and resilience, we encourage people to be curious and to have a shared commitment to excellence. Join us and make an impact!