Staff Software Engineer (Core Systems) - Robotics

Staff Software Engineer (Core Systems) - Robotics & Life Sciences | Complex Distributed SystemsLondon hybrid, 3 days per week£130,000 to £170,000Go/Python |Optimisation |Distributed Systems | Kubernetes |Event-Driven ArchitectureStaff Software Engineer - We’re working with a technology company building the software and robotics platform used to automate laboratory work across pharma and biotech.Their technology is directly supporting work across drug discovery, diagnostics and scientific research. Over the last year they’ve rebuilt their core platform from scratch and are now entering the next phase: building significantly more sophisticated functionality for larger pharma and biotech customers.The Product, Engineering and Design organisation is deliberately lean and flat, giving senior engineers genuine influence over architecture, engineering standards and what gets built next.As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll work on the core systems responsible for orchestrating physical laboratory automation. This isn’t standard backend engineering. You’ll tackle problems around scheduling, resource allocation, routing and optimisation, building distributed systems that have to coordinate physical resources reliably and in real-time.The platform runs Kubernetes at the edge, where compute is constrained rather than effectively unlimited, creating a very different set of engineering trade-offs to traditional cloud SaaS.You’ll remain deeply hands-on while providing technical leadership across the team, owning difficult architectural problems, improving engineering quality and helping other senior engineers deliver complex systems.What will the Staff Software Engineer do?Design and build the core scheduling, routing and resource-allocation systems behind the platformSolve complex optimisation problems using constraint modelling and solver technologiesBuild and evolve distributed, event-driven systems operating in real timeWork across Python and Go as core product logic increasingly moves towards GoDesign systems running on Kubernetes within constrained edge environmentsOwn significant areas of technical architecture and drive decisions through ambiguityRaise the quality bar across design, implementation, testing and production ownershipMentor senior engineers and help establish stronger engineering practices across the teamWork closely with Product and customers to ensure complex technical solutions translate into real scientific outcomesWhat will the Staff Software Engineer bring?Strong software engineering fundamentals with significant backend and distributed systems experienceExperience with Go and/or Python, with an appetite to work across bothGenuine experience with optimisation modelling, scheduling, routing, constraint solving or resource allocationExposure to solver technologies such as Google OR-Tools, Gurobi or similarStrong event-driven architecture experience using technologies such as Kafka, NATS JetStream or equivalentComfort working with