PhD Intern – Bioinformatics Applied AI (Agentic Workflow Development)

Responsibilities

• 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.

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.

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