Here's the tl;dr:

• We are on a mission to make programming biology easy. We provide biologists with the software, machine learning & services to discover, design and optimise enzymes and their cell-factories to ultimately produce almost anything.

• We're an experienced team. We have built many successful products before and we have raised enough funds to have plenty of runway for the years to come!

• We're focused on building the best possible team culture. We're distributed across two locations, and are flexible about when and where we work.

• We offer top of the market salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits from health and wellbeing, financial, to training and career progression opportunities.

This is Cradle

Cradle helps teams to engineer proteins with fewer, more successful experiments. We use generative machine learning models, accessible through user-friendly software interfaces, to help engineer protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity. We are bridge builders who bring together the best of machine learning, synthetic biology, developer tools, and user experience design. Our mission is to enable a world where most of the products around us can be easily made and degraded biologically using a cell-factory instead of (petro-)chemicals, plants or animal agriculture.

In software we have an almost infinite degree of freedom on designing solutions. We at Cradle want to use this flexibility to provide a new level of experience for biological engineers. These engineers work on optimising proteins (sequences of amino acids), which currently includes a lot of expert knowledge and manual steps. We want to revolutionise their processes and build a ‘photoshop for proteins’ supported by machine learning. On that mission we deal with complex user objectives, diverse data structures and physical lab interactions while offering an easy to use, low code user interface.

What we are looking for

For this challenge we are looking for full stack software engineers who are excited to peek out of the virtual world and join us on designing a platform for optimizing biological systems. Be ready to witness first hand what happens when you leave the bits and bytes behind and try to solve challenges with nature’s constraints and complexity.

Responsibilities:

As a full stack software engineer, you would be responsible to:

• Develop a decoupled, service oriented platform application powered by sophisticated machine learning tools

• Implement lightweight and modularized web-based user interfaces and visualizations

• Support the team in establishing a stable, high quality and flexible software engineering process

• Collaborate with biologists, machine learning experts and scientists alike and learn to understand their domain

• Work in a cloud native runtime environment using Google Cloud, Kubernetes, helm, docker et al.

• Integrate a variety of existing tools for biological processes in the Cradle ecosystem

Need to haves

• Strong algorithmic and problem solving skills

• You enjoy designing software systems. We are in an early stage of the company where you will majorly contribute to the software design of the product.

• You are excited about all parts of the software stack which is reflected in your past projects. At any given day you could be asked to extend a web server API, contribute to a codon optimizer*, or even implement a UI plugin.

• You are interested and excited about learning a new domain. You will be faced with a lot of new concepts and enjoy learning diverse topics.

• You have excellent knowledge of software development best practices, including code reviews, version control, and CI/CD pipelines.

• You are able to communicate well. We are working at the intersection of biology and software where good communication is key.

• You write readable code. Cradle aims to build a team of excellent computer scientists which includes advanced coding skills. We are set but not fixed on coding in Python at the moment.

• You are kind and work well both independently and in teams. We look for team players who contribute to a positive and friendly working environment.

*Do a little research online if you don’t know what this is :)

Nice to haves

• Extensive knowledge of the Python programming language and its ecosystem.

• A solid understanding of application development lifecycle, testing principles, and agile practices.

• You have worked with databases or big data systems.

• You have designed user interfaces and are familiar with one or more of the popular frameworks.

• You have been working on production systems for machine learning applications.

• Experience in building containerized backend systems using Docker and Kubernetes.

Cradle helps biologists design improved proteins in record time using powerful prediction algorithms and AI design suggestions.

We use generative machine learning models, accessible through user-friendly software interfaces, to help engineer protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity. Our mission is to ultimately help more people build with biology and replacing traditional farms and factories for a more sustainable world.

You will be joining a high-growth, highly ambitious startup with an experienced founding team, whose motivation is building a more sustainable world using biology. We are backed by some of the most well known investors and industry veterans. Joining us now means you will be getting in on the ground floor; you will have a significant impact on how we shape the company, and success will mean an outsized reward.

Did we pique your interest? We'd love to hear from you. Please use this form to apply directly.