Senior AI/ML Engineer: UK BioInterface Benchmark

Join Biophilica and help build the UK's first AI benchmark for real-world interfacial material s

Do you want your code to set the standard for how frontier AI/ML is tested in the physical world? Biophilica, an award-winning sustainable materials startup, is hiring a hands-on Senior AI/ML Engineer for up to eight months on a newly awarded Innovate UK project.

With Applied Form and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), we are building the UK BioInterface Benchmark: an open benchmark and evaluation harness for AI models that predict and design plant-based coatings and bonding systems. Most materials benchmarks cover bulk or idealised systems. Ours will capture the messy reality of manufacturing: multilayer architectures, process conditions, failure modes and contradictory data.

You will work to transform years of experimental data, scientific literature and new lab results into an AI-ready dataset, and build the tooling that lets anyone benchmark their models against it.

You won't be starting from a blank slate. You will build on our proprietary materials-AI platform, which already handles data ingestion, experiment organisation and an uncertainty-aware, neuro-symbolic modelling core. There is plenty of room to improve it, innovate and push it further.

Why Biophilica? We are on a mission to replace fossil-derived materials with plant-based alternatives, starting with our leather alternative, Treekind®. We work fast, value results, and pair hard science with AI.

Our achievements include:

• Awarded Innovate UK funding for the UK BioInterface Benchmark building on 6 years of public and private funding milestones
• Launched material with ID Geneve Watches in 2023
• Collaborations with globally recognised brands
• Demo-line and scale-up trials, supported by Innovate UK and the Henry Royce Institute

Awards:

• Cartier Women's Initiative 2024: 1st Place Europe
• PDS Ventures' and Global Fashion Agenda's Trailblazer 2024: Finalist
• Women in Innovation 2022
• Manufacturing Futures 2021
• Mills Fabrica Techstyle for Social Good 2021

Accelerators

• LVMH Startup Accelerator
• Fashion For Good accelerator and pilot programm
• Forrest Valley
• Tech Nation

About the role This is a senior, hands-on coding role. You will lead the data and evaluation engineering for the benchmark and extend our proprietary platform, as part of a collaborative team that includes data scientists at NPL, AI partners at Applied Form, and materials scientists at Biophilica.

Your work will include, but won't be limited to:

• Mature the data pipeline that ingests, cleans and standardises literature, patent and in-house experimental data into a benchmark dataset of 5,000+ datapoints
• Implement the benchmark schema and Functional Materials Ontology, including annotation tooling, confidence scoring and contradiction tracking
• Build baselines and the evaluation harness with NPL: standard models (XGBoost, SchNet, CGCNN and others), reproducible train/test splits, uncertainty calibration and a benchmark API
• Ship the open release: a documented public dataset slice and harness on GitHub that third parties can run

**What we're looking for

Essential** :

• 5+ years of professional software engineering, with at least 2 years building ML systems in production or research
• Expert-level Python (pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, PyTorch) and strong software practice: testing, version control, CI, clear documentation
• Experience building data pipelines from messy, heterogeneous sources, including PDF and text extraction
• Solid grounding in model evaluation: train/test design, error metrics (MAE, R²), and uncertainty or calibration methods
• Cloud experience, ideally Google Cloud Platform Azure, and/or Cloudflare
• Able to work independently on a short, milestone-driven contract and deliver from day one

Desirable:

• Experience with scientific or materials data (Materials Project, MatBench, JARVIS) or graph neural networks for chemistry
• Knowledge graphs, ontologies or neuro-symbolic approaches
• LLM-assisted information extraction from scientific literature
• Experience publishing open-source datasets, benchmarks or tools
• Startup experience and comfort working across companies and disciplines

What we offer

• A fixed-term contract of up to 8 months, January to August 2027, on a newly awarded Innovate UK project
• Competitive salary
• Semi-remote working, with regular collaboration days in London
• Work alongside NPL, the UK's national measurement institute, on benchmark design and validation
• Public credit on an open benchmark that researchers and AI developers will use
• Occasional travel within the UK
• A small, collaborative team making a real environmental impact

How to apply

• Send your CV, a short cover letter, and links to code you have written (GitHub or similar) to [email protected], with "Senior AI/ML Engineer" in the subject line. Please include your availability to start in January 2027, your salary expectations, and contact details for two professional references.
• Closing date: 1 November 2026. Applicants must have the right to work in the UK.

Interview process We aim to complete the process within about four weeks of the closing date.

• First interview (30 minutes). We talk about your experience, interests, availability from January and expectations.
• Coding exercise. Shortlisted candidates have 7 days to complete it.
• One or two follow-up interviews. A mix of technical and non-technical conversations with members of the team.

Equal opportunity employer Biophilica is committed to diversity and inclusion. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of age, disability, gender identity, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation. We are happy to make reasonable adjustments at any stage of the process.

Join us in building the benchmark that brings frontier AI to sustainable materials.