Founding Engineer - Cell Modeling and Control

About Tolemy

Biology is becoming programmable, but the tools scientists use still treat cells like black boxes.

At Tolemy, we’re building Orbit, the control panel for the cell. Our goal is to help scientists move from fragmented experimental data to mechanistic understanding, causal insight, and eventually control over complex cellular systems.

We’re starting in cell and gene therapy R&D, one of the most important and technically difficult areas of medicine. Better tooling here can help teams understand why cells behave the way they do, design better experiments, and bring life-saving therapies to patients faster.

This is not another SaaS product with a science wrapper. We are building digital representations of human cells, infrastructure that connects biological knowledge with experimental data, and product surfaces that help scientists reason from evidence to action.

If you want to help build software that changes how scientists understand, model, and control cells, helping them develop better therapies for patients, we’d love to meet you

Why join Tolemy

• You’ll work on one of the hardest and most meaningful problems in biotechnology: making complex cellular systems easier to understand, model, and improve.
• You’ll join early enough to shape our technical foundations, engineering culture, product direction, and company DNA.
• You’ll work across biology, machine learning, infrastructure, data, product, and design.
• You’ll help build tools for scientists that materially improve how therapies are discovered, developed, and brought to patients.

Our culture

We are building Tolemy around three core values:

💡 Stay curious. We ask questions, challenge assumptions, and keep looking for better answers.

♥️ Be kind, always. We care about how we work together, not just what we build.

🛤️ Move with purpose. The work matters, so we act with urgency, learn from mistakes, and keep improving.

We value people who are curious, thoughtful, collaborative, adaptable, and kind. You do not need to know everything already. We care much more about how you think, how you learn, and how you work with others.

Location, relocation, and benefits

• We’re building an in-person team in Barcelona, working together in English, and we welcome people who are still building confidence in English if they bring the right attitude.
• We support relocation to Barcelona, including paid relocation support and visa sponsorship where needed.
• We offer competitive salary, meaningful early-employee equity, and the chance to shape an ambitious company from the beginning.
• Benefits include unlimited personal leave, flexibility to work from home up to one day per week, a learning and conference budget, high-quality equipment, and practical support to help you make Barcelona home if it’s not already.

The Open Roles

We’re hiring across five technical roles to help build Orbit from an early product into a platform scientists use every day.

Founding Machine Learning Engineer

Build the modelling systems behind Orbit. You’ll work on models for sparse, noisy, high-dimensional biological data, helping scientists infer structure, quantify uncertainty, and make better experimental decisions.

Staff Software Engineer — Platform / Infrastructure

Build the technical foundations of Orbit: backend systems, data workflows, infrastructure, reliability, deployment, observability, and the architecture that lets a small team ship quickly without creating fragile systems.

Product Engineer

Build the scientist-facing product experiences through which users interact with Orbit. You’ll work across frontend, backend, AI-assisted workflows, data-heavy interfaces, and review experiences that help scientists understand and trust complex outputs.

Research Scientist

Help make Orbit deeply grounded in real experimental biology. You’ll work across mammalian cell culture, assay development, analytics, experimental design, data interpretation, and biological troubleshooting.

Research Assistant

Support the experimental engine behind Orbit. You’ll help run cell culture experiments, prepare samples, perform assays, organise datasets, document workflows, and make biological data more reliable and useful for modelling.

Who we’re looking for

We’re looking for people who are excited by hard problems, comfortable with uncertainty, and motivated by building something that matters.

You do not need to know everything already. Engineers do not need prior biology experience. Scientists do not need to be AI experts. But you should be curious, rigorous, kind, and excited to work across disciplines.

Apply here

We know great candidates rarely tick every box. If one of these roles excites you, we’d love to hear from you.

Or get in touch with us at careers@tolemy.bio.