Burns Sheehan
Staff Software Engineer
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Staff Software Engineer (Core Systems) – Robotics & Life Sciences | Complex Distributed Systems
London hybrid, 3 days per week £130,000 to £170,000
Go/Python | Optimisation | Distributed Systems | Kubernetes | Event-Driven Architecture
Staff 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.
The Staff Software Engineer
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.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
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 platform
- Solve complex optimisation problems using constraint modelling and solver technologies
- Build and evolve distributed, event-driven systems operating in real time
- Work across Python and Go as core product logic increasingly moves towards Go
- Design systems running on Kubernetes within constrained edge environments
- Own significant areas of technical architecture and drive decisions through ambiguity
- Raise the quality bar across design, implementation, testing, and production ownership
- Mentor senior engineers and help establish stronger engineering practices across the team
- Work closely with Product and customers to ensure complex technical solutions translate into real scientific outcomes
What will the Staff Software Engineer bring?
- Strong software engineering fundamentals with significant backend and distributed systems experience
- Experience with Go and/or Python, with an appetite to work across both
- Genuine experience with optimisation modelling, scheduling, routing, constraint solving, or resource allocation
- Exposure to solver technologies such as Google OR-Tools, Gurobi, or similar
- Strong event-driven architecture experience using technologies such as Kafka, NATS JetStream, or equivalent
- Comfort working with graph-based problems, algorithms, and complex system modelling
- Experience with Kubernetes and distributed production environments
- A track record of taking technically difficult problems through to working products, not just research or modelling
- Staff-level technical leadership skills, with the ability to influence architecture and raise the standard of engineers around you
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
This is an unusual opportunity for a Staff Software Engineer who enjoys genuinely difficult computer science problems but still wants to see their work shipped into the real world. You’ll join a small, high-autonomy engineering organisation immediately after a major platform rebuild, with the opportunity to define core technical systems that directly support drug discovery, diagnostics, and life sciences research.
Please reply with your CV or call Simon for a chat.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Location