PRINCIPAL / SENIOR PRINCIPAL / FELLOW, SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Who we are

Chemify is creating a future where the access to important molecules, drugs and new materials currently unimaginable are instantly accessible radically increasing the speed of innovation, quality of life, and reach of humanity. The company is building the infrastructure to digitize chemistry to design, make, and discover new molecules with the desired function and properties instantly and on-demand. Chemify has built a platform that combines purpose-built programming languages, robotics, AI, and the world’s largest and continuously growing database of chemical programs to accelerate chemical discovery to new, transformative heights.

Chemify is supported by some of the best investors from Silicon Valley and across the world, including Triatomic Capital, BlueYard ventures, DCVC, Founders Fund, and others.

The role

As Chemify continues to virtualize and automate all of chemistry, the Principal Software Engineer will join a software development team focused on quickly building, iterating on, and deploying modern software, algorithms, large data, and Artificial Intelligence solutions to change the world of Chemistry – and enable it even further! The Engineer will quickly take on a key technical leadership role at the company to guide complex technical decision-making towards exceptional resolution within a large, distributed software architecture unifying execution, data-mining, and predictive tasks within Chemify factories across the world. They will rely on their wealth of experience working at successful organizations to help implement large, complex, and highly integrated software systems, as well as provide the intensity and pace needed to ensure the rapid development of the infrastructure and best practices required for the success of an early-stage organization.

The Principal Software Engineer will have the opportunity to collaborate very closely with Chemists, Cheminformaticians, hardware engineers, operations experts, management, and other software engineers to quickly design, develop, launch, and maintain complex software systems within Chemify’s world-class solutions dedicated to Chemistry. The successful candidate will have world-class full stack experience: from large-scale cloud-based infrastructure to high-quality commercial product-level front-end UI/UX. They will have experience in best-in-class Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment pipelines and writing and teaching how to produce production-ready code within a professional environment. At this stage of their career, they remain extremely motivated to contribute not only to the hands-on aspect of the work but also to the development of a hyper-growth, silicon-valley style start-up by delivering high-quality code at a high-pace – in Glasgow, Scotland.

Additionally, the Principal Engineer will have a service mentality to understand the needs of the chemists and the business. They will use this to build high-quality solutions significantly improving short- and long-term performance of the company’s laboratory. The ideal candidate will be a highly experienced and already successful engineer. A smart, enthusiastic, energetic, and ambitious individual excited to lead the development of the world’s best infrastructure for high-throughput chemistry that will eventually handle the world’s load of synthesis, at Chemify.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of the company’s overall software architecture to ensure tight fit to short-, medium-, and long-term business needs. Solutions must be consistent, logical, scalable, and robust services with good system-level integration, and thoughtful responsibility layers from robot APIs to global load-balancing and supervision across multiple chemical factories worldwide.
• Lead the implementation of the various software elements building into the global Chemify platform by working closely with other engineers and creating processes and structures that will enable a continuously increasing number of high-quality contributions over time without direct supervision.
• Thoughtfully assess the tools available to the software, DevOps, and IT teams and the overall practices followed at the company. Quickly bring-in new solutions whenever warranted to ensure optimal performance in maintaining frequent high-quality feature and product releases while maintaining exceptional system reliability in production.
• Dramatically improve company efficiency in short timelines to maximize the value created by existing and future technology products in a human-centric system. Help prioritize and guide technology development.
• Introduce new processes and operational functions across the organization by integrating all components into highly efficient workflows decreasing costs, increasing quality, improving turn-around-time, and maximize the overall throughput of the organization.
• Work with Quality, Laboratory Operations, and Research Chemistry to optimize the day-to-day workflows of the company to ensure quality, efficiency, and scalability in the company’s ability to deliver on multiple complex chemical synthesis campaigns in parallel, leveraging the company’s core platform components.
• Work with hardware engineering, software engineering, and other functions to prioritize, design, develop, and implement high quality workflows heavily reliant on existing and new technologies.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance to software engineering teams. Mentor and coach junior engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
• Lead project planning, resource allocation, and timelines to meet project milestones. - Manage project risks and make informed decisions to keep projects on track.
• Work closely with management and other functions to analyze the efficiency of the laboratory, prioritize areas of improvements, and allocate resources to improve overall company efficiency quickly and aggressively.
• Collaborate on the ideation and development of long-term plans for transformative performance improvements for the company.
• Participate in other tasks across the company to ensure Chemify’s ultimate success.

Requirements

• BEng Hons or equivalent in software engineering, computer engineering, computer sciences, or equivalent.
• Over 10 years of experience in successfully contributing to highly complex software systems in a highly collaborative environment, within a large team, across the entire stack.
• A proven track record of building successful software solutions to complex and novel problems – trailblazing design and technology as needed.
• Experience architecting and implementing world-class and scalable infrastructure and systems for complex and big data challenges.
• A critical eye to assess the performance of software engineering teams and how to enable groups of engineers through best practices, best-in-class tool suites, optimal work cultures, and other elements of efficiency.
• Recognized thought leader in the world of software engineering.
• Exceptional leadership and motivational capabilities.
• Exceptional oral and written communication skills.
• Hardworking and excited to contribute to the Chemify mission.

Desired skills & attributes

• Experience in platform technology companies focused on scientific challenges a plus.
• Experience with Chemistry a plus.