Robotic Software Engineer

Location: Cambridge, England, gb

Company Description

Cell therapies are giving patients a second chance, including people facing cancers and other diseases that once had few options. The next challenge is access. To reach more patients, manufacturing has to become more reliable, more repeatable, and easier to scale. That’s what we’re building at Cellular Origins, and this role is a chance to help turn complex robotics into something trusted enough for real production.

Job Description

About the role

You’ll join our Robotics Engineering Team and get involved across the full software and product development cycle, from early analysis and architecture through to prototyping, implementation, and test development. You’ll collaborate closely with hardware and systems colleagues, because the best robotic software is built with the whole machine in mind.

This is a role for someone who enjoys both depth and variety. One day you might be refining a control approach or improving how we structure a ROS-based service. Another day you might be debugging behaviour on a real system, working with teammates to understand what’s happening and getting it stable.

What you’ll do

You’ll help bring our robotic automation platform to life, building software that’s clear, testable, and dependable when it matters.

You’ll get to:

• Shape robotic software from concept to delivery, including architecture, implementation, and automated testing

• Build and improve Python-based services and tooling that support hardware-focused applications

• Work with robotics prototyping stacks such as ROS 1/2, and help make them production-ready

• Integrate with industrial, networked communication protocols where needed

• Debug and improve robotics and automation systems, including control behaviour and system interactions

• Lead software development within a multidisciplinary team, raising quality through good engineering habits and mentoring

Qualifications

About you

You’ll enjoy this role if you like being close to the real system, and you care about building software that behaves predictably, not just in ideal conditions. You’ll bring a calm, structured approach to problem-solving, and you’ll be someone others trust when things get complicated.

You’ll bring:

• A Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related discipline, plus industry experience

• High proficiency in Python, with C++ and/or C# as a bonus

• Experience leading software development in a multidisciplinary environment

• Experience working on large-scale, safety-critical systems, ideally including robotics control systems

• Familiarity with industrial communication protocols and robotics prototyping tools such as ROS 1/2

• Product development and lifecycle experience that helps you think beyond the first demo and into long-term reliability

This role is a full-time, on-site position at our campus in Melbourn.

Additional Information

Benefits

Cellular Origins is based on the TTP Campus, within purpose-built sustainable offices, labs and green surroundings, 10 miles south of Cambridge. Our working culture encourages entrepreneurship, shared ideas and collaboration, while providing you the freedom to do your best work.

Our employee benefits include:

Annual bonus
25 days holiday
Employer pension contribution of 10% of salary
Free lunch and all-day refreshments
Private medical insurance for employees and dependants
Enhanced family friendly leave
Life insurance worth 6x salary
Electric car leasing scheme
Cycle to work scheme
Season ticket loan
Activities and community that supports healthy activities that bring colleagues together; whether it’s lunchtime squash or football, Zumba or our own rock band. Colleagues initiate new clubs and outings whenever they feel there’s something missing!
Local sports facilities and theatre discounts and memberships.

Ready to build something that matters?

If you want your robotics work to have a clear line of sight to patient impact, and you like the idea of building software that makes complex automation reliable at scale, we’d love to hear from you. Apply now and tell us what you’ve built, what you’ve learned from debugging real systems, and what you’re excited to take on next.