Backend Engineer

Founding team · Full-time · Hybrid (London or Oxford) · Meaningful equity

About us

Science runs on trust, but the machinery meant to produce that trust is failing. Peer review is slow, opaque, inconsistent, and increasingly gamed. And a flood of AI-generated research is about to overwhelm a system that was already straining. No one is the credible, independent arbiter of research quality. We think there should be one.

OxSci is building a credit rating agency for science: a certification layer that combines AI with expert peer review, so researchers, institutions, and AI developers can assess research quality quickly and at scale. We're early, focused, and well-resourced. The standards we set now (what "quality" even means, and how expert judgment and AI combine to produce a defensible rating) will define the company.

About the founders

OxSci was founded by Shumiao Ouyang, Associate Professor of Finance at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and Fellow in Management at Wadham College. His research spans fintech, digital payments, and AI; he holds a PhD in Economics from Princeton and degrees from Peking and Tsinghua Universities. He started OxSci out of a conviction that the systems for judging scientific quality are overdue for reinvention, and you'd be building it with him directly.

The technical side is led by OxSci's cofounder, a senior tech lead from one of the world's largest technology companies, with deep experience building and operating systems at global scale. This role works hand in hand with the cofounder day to day — you'd shape the platform's architecture and engineering culture together, from the ground up.

What you'll do

1. Build the backend for our core product services and AI-powered features, using Python / FastAPI to ship stable, scalable systems.
2. Design and implement model calls, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), context engineering, tool calling, and workflow orchestration across use cases spanning academic-content understanding, workflow assistance, output generation, and quality improvement.
3. Productionize the platform's AI feature modules — building task execution, state management, access control, logging/tracing, and failure-recovery capabilities.
4. Work with the product, frontend, and platform teams to take new features from validation to production, continuously improving quality, latency, stability, and cost.
5. Contribute to the design of data structures, knowledge-base interfaces, evaluation mechanisms, and service governance to keep the overall system maintainable.

What we're looking for

1. A solid backend foundation, strong Python skills, and hands-on project experience with FastAPI or a similar framework.
2. Strong service-design, API-design, and debugging skills — able to drive complex feature modules to stable delivery.
3. Familiarity with the fundamentals of LLM application development; experience with RAG, tool calling, context engineering, or workflow orchestration is a plus.
4. Experience building content-processing platforms, knowledge-base systems, complex business platforms, or AI-application backends is a plus.

What we offer

• Founding seat with meaningful equity and a direct line to the founders
• The rare chance to define a standard the field doesn't yet have

Interested in opportunities specifically in United Kingdom? Discover our dedicated Visa Sponsorship Jobs in United Kingdom page featuring roles from top employers in this location.

• Genuinely competitive pay; equity discussed openly
• Generous AI/LLM token budget for your daily work
• Fast personal growth, with broad ownership and scope from day one
• Flexible working hours

How to apply

• Location: Hybrid (London or Oxford)
• Visa: we can sponsor work visas for the right candidates in the near future.
• To apply: send your CV to [email protected], and include something you've built — an app, a website, or any project you'd love to talk about.