Location: Glasgow • Workstyle: Hybrid • Reports to: VP Software Engineering
We're open on level for the right person, this role can be scoped at Staff for a candidate with deeper platform ownership experience.
About Chemify
Chemify is revolutionising chemistry. We are creating a future where the synthesis of previously unimaginable molecules, drugs, and materials is instantly accessible. By combining AI, robotics, and the world's largest continually expanding database of chemical programs, we are accelerating chemical discovery to improve quality of life and extend the reach of humanity.
The Role
Everything Chemify does runs on the Unified Data Platform. When a molecule is designed, registered, sourced, synthesised by a robot, tested, and shipped, the platform is what carries it, one canonical identity for every chemical entity, one trusted answer for its properties and hazards, one record of what was actually made and shipped to clients.
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to own crucial parts of that platform. This is a genuinely full-stack role: you'll own applications end-to-end, the interfaces chemists and operations staff use every day, the services behind them, and the data pipelines that feed them.
The platform spans seven domains, chemical identity and registration, chemical safety, inventory, sourcing, reaction data, reference data, and the shared infrastructure underneath. You won't work across all of it, but you won't be boxed into one corner either. We'll match your area to your strengths and appetite, and we expect that to change as the platform grows. What stays constant is the level of ownership: your systems, your architecture calls, your users.
You'll work in a tight-knit, cross-functional environment spanning software, chemistry, operations, and programme management, the kind of place where curiosity across disciplines is an asset, not a distraction.
If you enjoy solving complex technical problems that make a real-world impact, are a natural communicator, and are energised by working closely with scientists using cutting-edge technology, we'd love to hear from you.
What You'll Work On
Applications people rely on daily. Full ownership of user-facing systems used by chemists, analysts, and operations teams across multiple sites, from the interface through to the data model.
Services that are the single source of truth. Registration and reference services where being authoritative matters, and where every other system is a consumer with its own expectations.
Domain modelling that has to be right. Chemical entities, batches, lineage, properties, hazards. These are hard models with real edge cases, and the abstractions you choose will outlive the code.
Data pipelines and orchestration. Dagster pipelines feeding a versioned data lake and a warehouse serving multiple use cases, with the reproducibility and governance that scientific data demands.
Reconciling sources that disagree. External datasets, vendor systems, and instruments that each claim a different truth, promoting trusted values into the systems everyone else depends on.
Key Responsibilities
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Own the full lifecycle of the applications and services in your area: scoping, architecture, development, deployment, and monitoring production.
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Design data models and workflows covering a wide range of use cases across AI chemistry, synthesis, and manufacturing.
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Build and maintain robust, observable pipelines for internal, client-specific, and literature data.
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Work directly with chemists and operations staff to understand how the work actually happens, not how the spec says it happens.
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Collaborate with Infrastructure to ensure new work is soundly architected and production-ready.
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Define and champion engineering and data best practices: versioning, testing, documentation, governance, data contracts.
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Mentor engineers and contribute to communities of practice across the team.
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Contribute to team-wide initiatives: code reviews, design discussions, ADRs, process improvements, and workstream planning.
What You'll Bring
Core
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Significant commercial software engineering experience.
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Strong Python, with production experience in FastAPI, Django, Flask, or similar.
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PostgreSQL fluency, schema design, query optimisation, and ORM frameworks such as SQLAlchemy/SQLModel.
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Commercial experience with TypeScript and React, and a genuine interest in UI/UX.
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Experience building and maintaining data-intensive applications, you're comfortable on both sides of the application/data boundary.
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Comfortable with containerised deployments (Docker) and CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, ArgoCD).
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Hands-on with AWS or another major cloud platform.
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Experience integrating with systems you don't own, negotiating contracts, handling partial failure, and enabling teams to own their data.
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You've genuinely rewired how you work around AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent), this is part of how we work, not a nice-to-have.
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Strong communicator, genuinely collaborative, comfortable with non-technical domain experts as your primary users.
Infrastructure & Data
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Working knowledge of Kubernetes/EKS, comfortable deploying to and reasoning about containerised workloads in a managed K8s environment.
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Experience orchestrating pipelines with Dagster, Airflow, Prefect, or similar.
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Solid grasp of ETL concepts and production-grade pipeline design.
Beneficial Skills
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Interest in chemistry, life sciences, robotics, or manufacturing.
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Hands-on experience with scientific data, chemical, biological, or laboratory.
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Experience building systems where the data model represents physical things, and being out of sync with reality has consequences.
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Previous experience in AI drug discovery is a genuine differentiator for us.
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Interest in semantic technologies (graph databases, ontologies) or modern data stack.
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Experience enabling analytics teams by building data models for BI tools and dashboards.
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Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (AWS CDK or Terraform) is a strong plus.
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Experience with product design thinking and tools such as Figma.
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A degree in Computer Science, a scientific discipline, or a related field, useful, not required. We care what you've built.
Why Join Chemify?
Impact: You'll own foundational parts of the platform that every other team at Chemify builds on, accelerating discovery and unlocking new possibilities in science and medicine.
Ownership: Real architectural authority over systems that matter, not tickets from someone else's backlog.
Autonomy: Reporting to the VP Software Engineering, you'll have genuine influence over technical direction and product quality.
Ambition: Series B, scaling rapidly, tackling problems at the frontier of robotics, AI, and chemistry. We're building the right foundations for the future.
