Senior Software Engineer – AI Innovation & Prototyping

We are Digital Science and we are advancing the research ecosystem. Our vision is a future where a trusted and collaborative research ecosystem drives progress for all.

Department: Technology

Location: UK

Overview

We believe in better, open, collaborative and inclusive research. In creating the next generation of tools and working in partnership with the community we tackle some of the biggest challenges to research. In order to achieve our vision, we need innovative, inspiring and dynamic people to join our team. If you are curious, creative, and ready to innovate at speed, and want to collaborate in a team of highly experienced senior developers, we’d love to hear from you.

Your new role

• Relentlessly focus on user outcomes: discover real user pain points, test hypotheses with working software, and validate impact with user feedback and data.
• Accelerate with AI without compromising quality: use AI-assisted programming and emerging agentic patterns to move fast, while keeping humans-in-the-loop for correctness, maintainability, and security.
• Continuously push the frontier: explore new AI capabilities (agentic “software engineer” concepts, tool-use, planning) and bring pragmatic, production-minded approaches to the team.

What You’ll Be Doing

• User-centered prototyping: work with PM and UX to frame user problems, define success metrics, and rapidly deliver prototypes and small bets that can be tested with real users.
• AI-assisted development: use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI code models to speed up implementation, testing, and refactoring while upholding engineering standards.
• Agentic patterns & orchestration: prototype systems that plan, call tools/functions, and collaborate with other agents; evaluate observability, safety, and cost-of-ownership.
• Cloud-native delivery: build throwaway-to-keep prototypes on AWS with CI/CD for quick deploys, preview environments, and fast rollback.
• Solid engineering hygiene at speed: establish patterns for testing (including LLM evals), typed APIs, tracing/metrics, and prompt/version management so prototypes are easy to extend or hand over.
• Framework fluency: apply AI frameworks when useful (Agents SDK, AI SDK, pydanticAI, LangChain, LlamaIndex); know when simple bespoke code is better.
• Collaboration & handover: partner with platform, data, and security teams; produce concise docs and runbooks so production teams can scale what works.
• Domain awareness: incorporate the realities of the academic/publishing ecosystem (workflows, metadata, IP/licensing) into solution design.
• Stay ahead of emerging technologies and methodologies, introducing new approaches that keep the team at the forefront of AI-augmented software engineering.

What You’ll Bring To The Role

• Several years of professional software engineering experience, ideally including full-stack or end-to-end development.
• Proven track record in building prototypes, MVPs, or innovative software solutions under tight timelines.
• Real-world cloud experience (AWS preferred) and CI/CD for rapid, reliable deployments.
• Demonstrated expertise in using AI coding assistants as part of the development workflow.
• Solid experience with modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g., JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Rust, React, Node.js).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and CI/CD pipelines to enable fast, reliable deployment.

Skills

• Advanced software development skills with the ability to balance speed and quality.
• Strong creative, curious, and experimental mindset. Comfortable exploring uncharted territory with new tools and approaches.
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and critical-thinking skills.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Self-motivated and passionate about staying up-to-date with cutting-edge technologies, especially in the AI space.
• Fluent in spoken and written English.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with academic/publishing workflows and data models.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform/CDK), vector databases, feature flags/A-B testing, and LLM observability/guardrails.

Please note - due to business need, we can only accept applications from candidates who reside in the following locations where we have established legal entities (UK, Spain, Germany, Romania). If you apply from outside of these areas, your application will not be considered.

We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.

Living our Values: bravery, collaboration, openness, and community focus drive our work. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment where every individual feels valued and belongs.

We look forward to receiving your application.

Seniority level: Mid-Senior level

Employment type: Full-time

Job function: Engineering and Information Technology

Industries: Software Development