THIS IS CRADLE

Proteins are the molecular machines of life, used for many therapeutic, diagnostic, chemical, agricultural and food applications. Designing and optimizing proteins takes a lot of expert knowledge and manual effort, through the use of custom computational and biological tools.
Machine learning is revolutionising this space, by enabling high-fidelity protein models. At Cradle, we offer a software platform for AI-guided discovery and optimization of proteins, so that biologists can design proteins faster and at scale. We are already used by clients across pharma, biotech, agritech, foodtech, and academia.
We’re an experienced team of over 40 people. We’ve built many successful products before and have enough funding for multiple years of runway. We are distributed across two main locations, Zurich and Amsterdam, and are focused on building the best possible team culture.
We offer our employees a very competitive salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits and career progression opportunities.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We’re looking for full stack software engineers who are excited to peek out of the virtual world and join us on designing a platform for optimizing biological systems! Be ready to witness first hand what happens when you leave the bits and bytes behind and try to solve challenges with nature’s constraints and complexity.

SKILLSET

We are looking for some selection of the following skills:

• Excitement about all parts of the software stack which is reflected in your past projects. At any given day you could be asked to design a REST API, contribute to a codon optimizer*, or design a UI plugin.
• Familiarity with designing user interfaces and are familiar with one or more popular frameworks (e.g. React).
• The Python programming language and its ecosystem. (FastAPI, uv, ruff, pyright, …).
• Databases and big data systems.
• Production systems for machine learning applications.
• Building containerized backend systems. (Docker, Kubernetes).
• You are kind and work well in teams. We look for team players and excellent communicators who contribute to a positive and friendly working environment.
• Do a little research online if you don’t know what this is :)

As a full stack software engineer, you will be responsible for designing and developing a service-oriented decoupled web application, which exposes our advanced machine learning models to scientific end users.

For example, this means:

• Implementing lightweight and modularized web-based user interfaces and visualizations, e.g. to rapidly prototype new UIs as new API endpoints become available.
• Architecting database designs to effectively store customer data, e.g. with consideration for how to represent the variability of biochemistry in future-proof ways (people invent new species of macromolecule all the time!).
• Owning large parts of the software design and development process. We are in an early stage of the company where you will majorly contribute to the software design of the product.
• Building modern documentation stacks which automatically stay up-to-date, e.g. through pulling in OpenAPI specifications.
• Collaborating with biologists, machine learning experts, and scientists alike, and becoming skilled in working in their domains.