PhD Intern – Bioinformatics Applied AI (Agentic Workflow Development)
London, United Kingdom — Hybrid: 4 days on-site, 1 day from home
PhD internship; doctoral programme must include funded industry placement; minimum 3 months
PhD Intern – Bioinformatics Applied AI (Agentic Workflow Development)
We are looking for a PhD intern to help develop agentic workflows to drive insight in bioinformatics and metabolomic chemistry.
Company
Bactobio is a London biotech startup. We work to solve the antimicrobial resistance crisis across healthcare and agriculture by producing the next generation of market-leading antimicrobials. Since inception in 2020, Bactobio has built a deeptech platform that combines AI, synthetic biology, and multiomics to routinely discover new antimicrobial classes from nature. Our antimicrobial platform is fully operational, and we now successfully target the worst diseases and build portfolios of new, safe, and effective antimicrobial classes that bypass resistance that we then move towards commercialisation.
Our culture is built around impact, empowerment, and collaboration. We attract incredible scientists from world-leading institutions, mix them with operational experts, and provide guidance through industry leaders acting as mentors. We strongly believe that diversity combined with open and inclusive conversations lead to better solutions. As a result, we have created a collaborative work environment, where ambitious people enjoy working together to make the world greener and safer.
Role
We are looking for passionate and driven PhD students whose doctoral program includes a funded industry internship and who want to experience life inside a dynamic biotechnology start-up. These are fully immersive, on-site placements at our London office and laboratories, lasting a minimum of three months.
In this role, you’ll design and build agentic LLM workflows that support decision-making in bioinformatics and metabolomic chemistry at Bactobio, using the latest capabilities in modern AI.
With plenty of support from our Bioinformatics & Machine Learning team, you’ll contribute Python code to turn messy scientific questions and tradeoffs into reliable workflows, combining frontier LLMs with our proprietary biological data to produce recommendations scientists can use and trust.
You’ll have scope to explore workflow architecture and tool use, prompt and instruction design, and quality evaluation with benchmarking, testing, and iteration; all in a real scientific environment.
This is an applied research role with an opportunity to ship real code. Expect to see your work integrated into our production platform and used daily by our scientists to speed up analysis, improve decision quality, and move the company forward in tangible ways.
Our previous interns come from a range of programmes, including PIPS, iCASE, and MRC LID. Read about recent internship experiences here and here.
Team
You’ll be joining a vibrant, tight-knit, and highly collaborative team of about fifty people. We sit and work together and take genuine interest in one another's work. Day-to-day, you’ll collaborate with wet-lab and automation scientists, data scientists, bioinformaticians, and software engineers, with plenty of exposure to the broader company journey too.
Everyone who writes code at Bactobio contributes regularly to the same shared codebase. We care about well-designed data models, best practices with sensible implementations, and building a tech stack that’s productive, maintainable, and genuinely enjoyable to work in.
Core responsibilities
Will be discussed based on the individual candidate's experience
Benefits
The chance to be part of a fun, multicultural, kind, ambitious and impact-driven crowd
Daily access to leaders and mentors in the business
Brand new, modern labs in Central London with dedicated office space, large balconies, and 360’ views of the London skyline, where we all spend 4 days per week (1 day working from home)
25 days holiday + bank holidays (pro rata for the period)
Flexible start and finish times within the company’s core hours to fit your preferences
Diverse team of colleagues (check out our website to meet us)
Weekly team activities including board games, sports activities, and socials
Complimentary snacks, fruits, tea, coffee, soft drinks,...
Access to 1000s of training courses through Udemy, with an allowance for both personal development and work-related training
Employee Assistance Programme offering structured counselling, life and career coaching, legal and financial advice
About Bactobio
We are a London-based biotechnology startup using breakthrough technologies in synthetic biology, next-generation sequencing and machine learning to cultivate the 99% of previously unculturable microbes. These microbes constitute the biggest bioresource in life, and our exclusive access allows us to discover novel chemicals that can be applied across a variety of markets.
We are impact-driven. Our first goal is to solve the growing antimicrobial resistance crisis through novel antibiotics and stabilise global food security through novel natural biodegradable fungicides.
