Software Engineer London, UK

Polaron is a spin out from Imperial College London, founded by Dr Isaac Squires, Dr Steve Kench, and Dr Sam Cooper.

The founders share a mission: to harness engineering, artificial intelligence, and materials science to design the materials of the future.

Our vision is to become the world leader at the interface between AI and materials, combining scientific rigour with engineering pragmatism to enable the next generation of sustainable, high performance materials.

Our work isn't just about hard, scientific problems-it's about the urgency and impact of solving them. Advanced materials underpin all aspects of modern life: from the batteries that power electric vehicles to the alloys used in turbines and the composites that make aircraft lighter.

Accelerating how these materials are developed, designed, and manufactured has a direct impact on the world's ability to build a more sustainable future.

We're developing a cloud based SaaS platform that empowers materials engineers to use state of the art image based AI without friction, helping them generate insights and accelerate innovation with minimal effort.

Our key stats:

• Team of 12 people today, growing fast.
• Based in East London (Shoreditch Exchange, Hoxton).
• Backed by cutting edge research and strong industry partnerships.
• Stack: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Express, Prisma, Python (PyTorch), PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform.

What we're building:

At Polaron, we're building the next generation of tools that enable materials scientists and manufacturers to leverage state of the art AI vision models, all without ever leaving their web browser.

Our application consists of:

• A data intensive visual interface that enables users to explore, interact with, and analyse complex datasets (including high resolution image data) directly in the browser built for performance and fluidity at scale.
• Interactive visualisation and analysis tools that combine 2D, 3D, and graph plotting.
• A computational orchestration layer that connects the frontend experience with machine learning models, allowing users to run sophisticated analyses and simulations seamlessly.
• Scalable AI infrastructure for training, serving, and executing complex machine learning workflows across distributed environments.

Why we're hiring:

We're entering a period of rapid product and infrastructure scaling. To support this, we're hiring a Full Stack Software Engineer who will build features across the stack - from backend systems to user facing product experiences.

This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys variety: designing APIs, shaping user interfaces, and ensuring the whole system works seamlessly together. You'll take ownership of features end to end, from idea to production, and help us deliver powerful yet intuitive tools to our customers.

This is a hands on, high ownership role for someone who wants to build the core technology that enables the world's most advanced materials to be developed and manufactured. You'll have the freedom to make architectural decisions, work closely with scientists and engineers, and see your code directly power breakthroughs in industry and research.

This role reports directly to our Head of Engineering and offers a significant degree of autonomy and influence over technical decisions and product direction.

A snapshot of your first 6 months at Polaron: Month 1 - Understand and Contribute

• Get familiar with Polaron's stack, workflows, and development practices.
• Ship meaningful, incremental improvements to our systems or product features.
• Build confidence deploying and testing your own changes.

Month 3 - Take Ownership

• Deliver a complete feature across the stack (frontend & backend).
• Collaborate with designers, FDEs, and ML engineers to translate a user problem into a working product.
• Improve performance, reliability, or developer experience within a key area.

Month 6 - Drive Impact

• Independently deliver impactful, well architected features and systems.
• Develop strong product intuition and technical judgment - making clear trade offs on speed, quality, and scope.
• Contribute to improving engineering workflows, architecture, and internal tools.

Our hiring process:

1. Intro Call (20 min) get to know you, your experience, and your motivation.
2. Technical Pairing (1 hr) collaborative coding session over video call.
3. Paid Trial Day work with the team on a real engineering challenge (remote or onsite).
4. Final Debrief & Offer.

We value transparency and fast feedback at every step.

You're an adaptable engineer who enjoys working across the stack to build well crafted, reliable software.

You have:

• 3+ years of experience building full stack web applications.
• Strong proficiency with using TypeScript across the stack (we use React, Node.js, and Prisma). If you love writing full stack TypeScript and modelling complex state with types, this role is for you!
• Experience working with relational databases (we use PostgreSQL).
• Experience building APIs and integrating with cloud based services.
• Ability to reason about architecture, performance, and system design.

Bonus points for:

• Experience with Python.
• Exposure to visualization heavy or scientific applications.
• Familiarity with common cloud providers such as AWS, and technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.

Mindset and values:

• Is flexible and pragmatic, comfortable working across frontend and backend.
• Balances speed with craftsmanship - can prototype quickly but writes reliable, maintainable code.
• Cares deeply about product quality, not just code quality.
• Is curious about the science and AI underpinning our platform.
• Enjoys collaboration and contributes actively to team discussions.
• Thrives in a startup environment - comfortable with ambiguity and fast iteration.

Team and culture:

• High trust and ownership.
• Pragmatism over dogma.
• Curiosity, humility, and scientific discipline.
• A strong focus on quality, impact, and long term maintainability.

What we value at Polaron:

• STEM mindset: genuine curiosity for science and the physical world.
• Hunger to learn: proactive, self driven, and impact oriented.
• Pragmatism: you prefer solutions that work over theoretical perfection.
• Low ego & empathy: you lift others up, you listen, you share knowledge.
• Long term commitment: you want to grow with the company and shape its journey.

Compensation and perks:

• Salary: £75,000 - £95,000 depending on experience.
• Equity: meaningful stock options in a growing company.
• Holidays: 25 days + 2 "festive leave" days.
• Perks: gym membership, free barista coffee.

Location: Shoreditch Exchange (Hoxton, London).