Substrate Bio
The opportunity The researchers, data scientists, and ML engineers driving AI-driven biological discovery do not yet know Substrate exists. The Community Manager is the person who will change that. This is Substrate's first dedicated community hire. You will build from scratch: the relationships, the channels, the content, the events, and the feedback loops that turn a network of interested researchers into an active, technically engaged community. You will be the external face of Substrate to the AI x biology research world, and the voice of that world inside Substrate. About Substrate Substrate is building and operating a network of fully autonomous wet laboratories. We are the critical infrastructure layer for AI-driven biological discovery: cloud-based data production facilities, tightly integrated with AI foundation models, that make high-quality experimental biology as accessible as compute. We are a small team, four co-founders and a founding hire class now building out, with venture funding and government grants, opening our first node in London and a second node in San Francisco in parallel. The work is hard and the timeline is compressed. We have two scientific verticals live (protein characterisation and functional genomics), a software platform that connects API calls to automated assay execution, and a commercial pipeline that spans foundation model labs, AI biotechs, pharmaceutical companies, and publicly funded research organisations. We are growing to roughly thirty people by early 2027. The role You will own Substrate's community function end to end. The immediate priority is establishing Substrate's presence in the communities where our most important potential users and customers already spend time: AI-biology conferences, academic research groups, frontier AI lab developer communities, and the broader open-science data ecosystem. The obvious operational pieces are real and important: building and managing Substrate's community channels, creating content (technical posts, case studies, event recaps) that demonstrates what the platform can do, representing Substrate at conferences and research events, and tracking engagement in ways that help the commercial, product and science teams make decisions. Two parts of the role are less standard, and they are why this hire matters so much to Substrate's success. The first is technical credibility. Substrate's community spans researchers who publish in leading journals and engineers who build training pipelines for frontier models. Community management here is not event coordination and social media scheduling; it is substantive engagement with people who will interrogate the science, the data quality, and the integration architecture. The Community Manager needs to be able to meet them there. The second is commercial adjacency. Community at Substrate is not a brand exercise. The relationships built through community will directly feed the commercial pipeline, inform pricing and product decisions, and define which customer segments Substrate chooses to serve deeply. You will work closely with Anna, co-founder, who leads partnerships and go-to-market, and you will operate as a genuine commercial, product and science partner. What you will do in your first twelve months FIRST 90 DAYS JUL TO SEP 2026 Map the existing relationships the founding team holds across research institutions, frontier AI labs, pharma and Ai-native biotechs, and the AI-biotech community; understand which are most relevant to a community-first strategy. Establish Substrate's presence on the channels where the AI x biology research community spends time: a newsletter, relevant online communities, forums, podcasts, and a cadence for conference participation. Publish Substrate's first substantive technical community content: a post or article that demonstrates what the platform does and why it matters to researchers doing AI-driven biology. Identify the ten to fifteen research groups, labs, or organisations that should be Substrate's first community anchor relationships, and begin active outreach and relationship building. MONTHS 4 TO 8 OCT 2026 TO FEB 2027 Build and manage an active community presence around the London node opening: coordinate the launch event, manage researcher outreach, and produce the content that captures what Substrate's first operational period looks like. Establish a structured feedback loop between the community and the product and science teams, so that what researchers ask for and struggle with reaches the people who can act on it. Build the San Francisco community presence in parallel: identify the key organisations, events, and channels in the Bay Area AI-biology ecosystem and establish Substrate's footprint there. Develop a content calendar and production cadence that does not depend on the founding team's time to sustain. Refine the community infrastructure: channel selection, moderation policy, engagement metrics, and reporting to the commercial and product teams. MONTHS 9 TO 12 MAR TO JUN 2027 Build the community to a size and engagement level where it is a measurable input to commercial pipeline: researcher referrals, inbound interest driven by community content, and a clear record of which community relationships have become or are likely to become commercial relationships. Produce a community playbook that documents the channels, content types, event formats, and relationship cadences that work for Substrate's audience. Continue building the community infrastructure needed for the San Francisco node: what an active and engaged community looks like in the Bay Area. Who you are The pattern we are looking for combines genuine scientific credibility with commercial experience at a technical company. You will have spent five or more years close to research communities, in a developer relations, scientific outreach, partnerships, or community role at an AI, tech or biotech company. You understand how researchers and data scientists think, what they find credible, and how to earn their attention and trust. You are a strong communicator. You can write a technical post that a principal scientist will find rigorous and a graduate student will find accessible. You can run a panel discussion at a conference, write a newsletter, and manage an online community, and you bring a consistent point of view to all three. You are not looking for a role where the output is impressions and follower counts; you are looking for a role where the output is trust, relationships and BD. You are comfortable building infrastructure that does not yet exist. The community playbook has not been written. The channels have not been established. The question of what Substrate's community is for and who belongs to it is still open. MUST HAVE Five or more years in a community, developer relations, scientific outreach, or technical partnerships role at a company serving research, life sciences, or AI scientists. A demonstrated ability to build a technical community from a low base: growing engagement, producing credible content, and managing relationships with researchers, scientists, or engineers. Strong written communication skills, with a track record of producing technical or scientific content for a specialist audience. Scientific or technical literacy sufficient to engage substantively with biology, data science, and AI practitioners. Willingness to be based in London or San Francisco, with travel to the other location and to key scientific conferences NICE TO HAVE Scientific background (BSc or higher) in biology, biochemistry, computer science, or a related field. Experience in a developer relations or community role at a platform or infrastructure company. Existing relationships within the AI x biology research community AI biotechs, frontier AI labs, academic research groups, or pharma R&D. Familiarity with the conference and events landscape for AI-driven biological discovery. Experience with data or API product communities. Why this is unusual Most community management roles sit inside companies whose community is already defined: a user base that exists, a product that is live, a channel that has followers. The job is to grow and manage something that has already started. This is not that. Substrate's community is not yet built. The audience spans researchers, data scientists, ML engineers, and computational biologists working at the intersection of AI and wet-lab biology; it includes people in academic research groups, philanthropic foundations, frontier AI labs, pharma R&D, and biotech startups, all with different professional contexts and different needs from a community of this type. Part of the job is working out who the community is for and why it exists, before building it. The commercial adjacency is also unusual. In most companies, community and commercial are kept at arm's length: community builds trust, commercial closes deals, and the two teams share data and tooling but operate separately. At Substrate, the community function is one of the primary go-to-market channels, and the Community Manager is a genuine commercial partner. Compensation and equity Compensation is competitive against London and San Francisco market rates for a senior community hire at a venture-backed company, calibrated to the seniority and scope of this role. Equity is meaningful, on the standard four-year vesting schedule with a one-year cliff. We are happy to discuss the structure and philosophy in more detail with shortlisted candidates. . click apply for full job details
The opportunity The researchers, data scientists, and ML engineers driving AI-driven biological discovery do not yet know Substrate exists. The Community Manager is the person who will change that. This is Substrate's first dedicated community hire. You will build from scratch: the relationships, the channels, the content, the events, and the feedback loops that turn a network of interested researchers into an active, technically engaged community. You will be the external face of Substrate to the AI x biology research world, and the voice of that world inside Substrate. About Substrate Substrate is building and operating a network of fully autonomous wet laboratories. We are the critical infrastructure layer for AI-driven biological discovery: cloud-based data production facilities, tightly integrated with AI foundation models, that make high-quality experimental biology as accessible as compute. We are a small team, four co-founders and a founding hire class now building out, with venture funding and government grants, opening our first node in London and a second node in San Francisco in parallel. The work is hard and the timeline is compressed. We have two scientific verticals live (protein characterisation and functional genomics), a software platform that connects API calls to automated assay execution, and a commercial pipeline that spans foundation model labs, AI biotechs, pharmaceutical companies, and publicly funded research organisations. We are growing to roughly thirty people by early 2027. The role You will own Substrate's community function end to end. The immediate priority is establishing Substrate's presence in the communities where our most important potential users and customers already spend time: AI-biology conferences, academic research groups, frontier AI lab developer communities, and the broader open-science data ecosystem. The obvious operational pieces are real and important: building and managing Substrate's community channels, creating content (technical posts, case studies, event recaps) that demonstrates what the platform can do, representing Substrate at conferences and research events, and tracking engagement in ways that help the commercial, product and science teams make decisions. Two parts of the role are less standard, and they are why this hire matters so much to Substrate's success. The first is technical credibility. Substrate's community spans researchers who publish in leading journals and engineers who build training pipelines for frontier models. Community management here is not event coordination and social media scheduling; it is substantive engagement with people who will interrogate the science, the data quality, and the integration architecture. The Community Manager needs to be able to meet them there. The second is commercial adjacency. Community at Substrate is not a brand exercise. The relationships built through community will directly feed the commercial pipeline, inform pricing and product decisions, and define which customer segments Substrate chooses to serve deeply. You will work closely with Anna, co-founder, who leads partnerships and go-to-market, and you will operate as a genuine commercial, product and science partner. What you will do in your first twelve months FIRST 90 DAYS JUL TO SEP 2026 Map the existing relationships the founding team holds across research institutions, frontier AI labs, pharma and Ai-native biotechs, and the AI-biotech community; understand which are most relevant to a community-first strategy. Establish Substrate's presence on the channels where the AI x biology research community spends time: a newsletter, relevant online communities, forums, podcasts, and a cadence for conference participation. Publish Substrate's first substantive technical community content: a post or article that demonstrates what the platform does and why it matters to researchers doing AI-driven biology. Identify the ten to fifteen research groups, labs, or organisations that should be Substrate's first community anchor relationships, and begin active outreach and relationship building. MONTHS 4 TO 8 OCT 2026 TO FEB 2027 Build and manage an active community presence around the London node opening: coordinate the launch event, manage researcher outreach, and produce the content that captures what Substrate's first operational period looks like. Establish a structured feedback loop between the community and the product and science teams, so that what researchers ask for and struggle with reaches the people who can act on it. Build the San Francisco community presence in parallel: identify the key organisations, events, and channels in the Bay Area AI-biology ecosystem and establish Substrate's footprint there. Develop a content calendar and production cadence that does not depend on the founding team's time to sustain. Refine the community infrastructure: channel selection, moderation policy, engagement metrics, and reporting to the commercial and product teams. MONTHS 9 TO 12 MAR TO JUN 2027 Build the community to a size and engagement level where it is a measurable input to commercial pipeline: researcher referrals, inbound interest driven by community content, and a clear record of which community relationships have become or are likely to become commercial relationships. Produce a community playbook that documents the channels, content types, event formats, and relationship cadences that work for Substrate's audience. Continue building the community infrastructure needed for the San Francisco node: what an active and engaged community looks like in the Bay Area. Who you are The pattern we are looking for combines genuine scientific credibility with commercial experience at a technical company. You will have spent five or more years close to research communities, in a developer relations, scientific outreach, partnerships, or community role at an AI, tech or biotech company. You understand how researchers and data scientists think, what they find credible, and how to earn their attention and trust. You are a strong communicator. You can write a technical post that a principal scientist will find rigorous and a graduate student will find accessible. You can run a panel discussion at a conference, write a newsletter, and manage an online community, and you bring a consistent point of view to all three. You are not looking for a role where the output is impressions and follower counts; you are looking for a role where the output is trust, relationships and BD. You are comfortable building infrastructure that does not yet exist. The community playbook has not been written. The channels have not been established. The question of what Substrate's community is for and who belongs to it is still open. MUST HAVE Five or more years in a community, developer relations, scientific outreach, or technical partnerships role at a company serving research, life sciences, or AI scientists. A demonstrated ability to build a technical community from a low base: growing engagement, producing credible content, and managing relationships with researchers, scientists, or engineers. Strong written communication skills, with a track record of producing technical or scientific content for a specialist audience. Scientific or technical literacy sufficient to engage substantively with biology, data science, and AI practitioners. Willingness to be based in London or San Francisco, with travel to the other location and to key scientific conferences NICE TO HAVE Scientific background (BSc or higher) in biology, biochemistry, computer science, or a related field. Experience in a developer relations or community role at a platform or infrastructure company. Existing relationships within the AI x biology research community AI biotechs, frontier AI labs, academic research groups, or pharma R&D. Familiarity with the conference and events landscape for AI-driven biological discovery. Experience with data or API product communities. Why this is unusual Most community management roles sit inside companies whose community is already defined: a user base that exists, a product that is live, a channel that has followers. The job is to grow and manage something that has already started. This is not that. Substrate's community is not yet built. The audience spans researchers, data scientists, ML engineers, and computational biologists working at the intersection of AI and wet-lab biology; it includes people in academic research groups, philanthropic foundations, frontier AI labs, pharma R&D, and biotech startups, all with different professional contexts and different needs from a community of this type. Part of the job is working out who the community is for and why it exists, before building it. The commercial adjacency is also unusual. In most companies, community and commercial are kept at arm's length: community builds trust, commercial closes deals, and the two teams share data and tooling but operate separately. At Substrate, the community function is one of the primary go-to-market channels, and the Community Manager is a genuine commercial partner. Compensation and equity Compensation is competitive against London and San Francisco market rates for a senior community hire at a venture-backed company, calibrated to the seniority and scope of this role. Equity is meaningful, on the standard four-year vesting schedule with a one-year cliff. We are happy to discuss the structure and philosophy in more detail with shortlisted candidates. . click apply for full job details
Substrate Bio
The opportunity Substrate is building a network of fully autonomous wet labs, cloud-based data production facilities for AI biology, integrated with foundation models to become the critical infrastructure layer for AI-driven biological discovery. Our first node opens in King's Cross, London, with several integrated workcells and two scientific verticals online by mid-2027. Our customers range from foundation model labs to global pharma. We are hiring a Head of Functional Genomics to build and lead the functional genomics vertical from scratch. The vertical covers the full pipeline: cell line engineering, perturbation library design, screen execution, and bulk and single-cell sequencing readouts, with the resulting data feeding customer pipelines that include foundation model training for virtual cell models. This is the second scientific vertical we are bringing online: manual development is starting now, and full autonomous execution on workcells is targeted for mid-to-late 2027. You will own the screening menu, scope it against early customer demand, shape the workcells the screens will eventually run on, and build the team that operates the function at scale. You will be the senior functional genomics scientist in the company at hire. About Substrate Substrate is spinning out of Automata, the UK lab automation company that has built the workcell platform our labs run on. Our four co-founders are Mostafa ElSayed (CEO and founder of Automata), Oli Hoy (formerly VP Customer Experience at Automata), Alexey Morgunov (AI Scientist co-founder, leading the intelligence software product), and a Founding Biology Lead joining shortly. We are aiming to have ramped up to 32 people by the end of Q1 2027. We are funded in parallel by a combination of venture funding and government grants. We are not a cloud lab and we are not a CRO. We are an autonomous lab platform with closed-loop integration available as one operating mode for foundation model partners. The role You will own functional genomics end-to-end. Day one priorities are the scientific pieces of standing up a vertical from scratch: scoping the priority screening menu against early customer demand, developing and validating those screens manually, setting quality thresholds, and hiring the Principal Scientists, Scientists, and Lab Technicians who will operate the function at scale. The vertical will eventually span cell line engineering across catalogue lines and iPSC-derived models, perturbation library design and production, pooled screen execution, and bulk and single-cell sequencing readouts; the day-1 wedge is one end-to-end workflow through these stages, scoped narrowly to a focused starting subset within each, and you decide what that scope looks like. Two parts of the role are not standard, and they are why this role is so crucial to Substrate's success. The first is that the functional genomics vertical is being built AI-first from day one. Every screen is designed from scratch for full AI-in-the-loop automation, not retrofitted onto a manual workflow. You do the work by hand first, exactly as you would in a high-end pharma research lab, and then work with Automata's automation scientists to shape the workcells the screens will eventually run on. You will define the quality thresholds for each transition stage, decide which manual judgement calls have to be re-engineered out, and own the validation that proves equivalence at each step. The second is closed-loop work with foundation model partners. Substrate's distinctive operating mode is producing structured, machine-readable experimental data fast enough to feed directly into foundation model training. That changes how functional genomics screens get designed: cell line provenance, library composition, perturbation metadata, sequencing QC, and consistency across runs become first-class scientific constraints. You will work directly with model partners on screen co-design, and with our software and intelligence teams on how the resulting data flows back into customer pipelines and into Substrate's own data factory. You will also be the executive partner to the co-founders on anything functional-genomics related: the screening roadmap, the proprietary functional genomics dataset programme on the reserved fraction of lab capacity, and the customer conversations where functional genomics depth is decisive. What you will do in your first twelve months PHASE 0: NOW TO AUG 2026 Land in the lab. Set up workspace at our King's Cross site and start manual screen development. Scope the day-1 wedge against early customer demand: which cell line, which perturbation library, which sequencing readout, validated as one end-to-end workflow before the menu starts to expand. Hire the first Principal Scientist and Lab Technician alongside you. Define the roles, run the processes, close the offers. PHASE 1: SEP TO DEC 2026 Develop and validate the first screens manually. Set the reproducibility and quality thresholds that will serve as acceptance criteria for the moves to instrumented and to fully autonomous execution. Co-design protocols with the software and automation engineering teams so that the manual versions you validate are automation-ready by design. Decide which manual judgement calls have to be engineered out before they hit a workcell. Begin co-design conversations with the first commercial customers, including the foundation model partners coming online from mid-2027. PHASE 2: JAN TO MAR 2027 Workcells arrive in the lab. Move the validated screens onto them, running with instrumentation and human intervention in the loop ahead of full autonomous operation later in 2027. Validate equivalence against the manual baselines. Grow the team. Bring on the second Principal Scientist and the first scientists at the bench to support throughput as the screening menu opens to customers. Ship the first revenue on the functional genomics vertical from manual and semi-automated services. Who you are You are an experienced functional genomics scientist who has built or led a screening function at a biotech, pharma R&D, or CRO. You are comfortable in the detail at the bench and you are comfortable setting direction for a team. The shape of the problem is what attracts you: a screening portfolio that has to be designed for autonomous execution from day one, in a business where the data the lab produces is itself part of the product. You have hired and managed scientists, principal scientists, and technicians. You have set quality thresholds and held people to them. You have run screens that supported real customers, internal teams in pharma or biotech or external customers in a CRO setting, and you understand what enterprise-grade scientific operations look like. You are pragmatic about being hands on at the bench in the first six to nine months, and excited about the team you will build behind you. You enjoy interviewing, hiring, mentoring, and setting standards. You will be in the lab at our King's Cross site at the cadence the science demands. That cadence will be heavy in the manual development phase and ease as the function grows and protocols move onto instrumentation. You are comfortable with that. MUST HAVE Seven or more years of experience in functional genomics or related disciplines (target validation, perturbation screening), with at least three in a senior or team leading role at a biotech, pharma R&D, or CRO. End to end hands on experience in at least one screening modality (typically CRISPR knockout or CRISPRi knockdown), covering cell line preparation, library design, screen execution, and sequencing readout, with working familiarity across single cell readouts and validation workflows. Track record of leading a small scientific team end to end: hiring, setting quality standards, and managing performance against scientific outputs. Customer facing experience, either as a CRO scientific lead working with external customers, or as a pharma or biotech scientist embedded with internal customer teams. NICE TO HAVE Hands on experience in cell line engineering, particularly iPSC differentiation or CRISPR edited stable cell line generation. Direct experience moving screens from manual workflows onto lab automation platforms. Familiarity with structured experimental data capture, LIMS, ELN, or analogous data infrastructure. Experience working with computational or AI/ML colleagues on closed loop perturbation programmes. Background at an AI native biotech or foundation model company. Why this is unusual Most senior functional genomics roles in industry sit either inside a pharma R&D group (slow iteration, internal customers only), inside a CRO (external customers, faster iteration, but optimised for service throughput rather than scientific decisions about screen design), or inside an AI native biotech (fast iteration, but a single internal customer in the company's own pipeline). This is none of the three. You will be designing a screening menu that has to be automation ready from the first manual experiment, working with foundation model labs on closed loop programmes that do not have a precedent in any of those settings, and owning the proprietary dataset programme that turns the lab itself into a commercial asset. It is also a functional genomics role with significant software and AI surface area. Your design decisions affect what the orchestrator has to do, what data flows back to model partners, and which manual judgements get re engineered out of the workflow . click apply for full job details
The opportunity Substrate is building a network of fully autonomous wet labs, cloud-based data production facilities for AI biology, integrated with foundation models to become the critical infrastructure layer for AI-driven biological discovery. Our first node opens in King's Cross, London, with several integrated workcells and two scientific verticals online by mid-2027. Our customers range from foundation model labs to global pharma. We are hiring a Head of Functional Genomics to build and lead the functional genomics vertical from scratch. The vertical covers the full pipeline: cell line engineering, perturbation library design, screen execution, and bulk and single-cell sequencing readouts, with the resulting data feeding customer pipelines that include foundation model training for virtual cell models. This is the second scientific vertical we are bringing online: manual development is starting now, and full autonomous execution on workcells is targeted for mid-to-late 2027. You will own the screening menu, scope it against early customer demand, shape the workcells the screens will eventually run on, and build the team that operates the function at scale. You will be the senior functional genomics scientist in the company at hire. About Substrate Substrate is spinning out of Automata, the UK lab automation company that has built the workcell platform our labs run on. Our four co-founders are Mostafa ElSayed (CEO and founder of Automata), Oli Hoy (formerly VP Customer Experience at Automata), Alexey Morgunov (AI Scientist co-founder, leading the intelligence software product), and a Founding Biology Lead joining shortly. We are aiming to have ramped up to 32 people by the end of Q1 2027. We are funded in parallel by a combination of venture funding and government grants. We are not a cloud lab and we are not a CRO. We are an autonomous lab platform with closed-loop integration available as one operating mode for foundation model partners. The role You will own functional genomics end-to-end. Day one priorities are the scientific pieces of standing up a vertical from scratch: scoping the priority screening menu against early customer demand, developing and validating those screens manually, setting quality thresholds, and hiring the Principal Scientists, Scientists, and Lab Technicians who will operate the function at scale. The vertical will eventually span cell line engineering across catalogue lines and iPSC-derived models, perturbation library design and production, pooled screen execution, and bulk and single-cell sequencing readouts; the day-1 wedge is one end-to-end workflow through these stages, scoped narrowly to a focused starting subset within each, and you decide what that scope looks like. Two parts of the role are not standard, and they are why this role is so crucial to Substrate's success. The first is that the functional genomics vertical is being built AI-first from day one. Every screen is designed from scratch for full AI-in-the-loop automation, not retrofitted onto a manual workflow. You do the work by hand first, exactly as you would in a high-end pharma research lab, and then work with Automata's automation scientists to shape the workcells the screens will eventually run on. You will define the quality thresholds for each transition stage, decide which manual judgement calls have to be re-engineered out, and own the validation that proves equivalence at each step. The second is closed-loop work with foundation model partners. Substrate's distinctive operating mode is producing structured, machine-readable experimental data fast enough to feed directly into foundation model training. That changes how functional genomics screens get designed: cell line provenance, library composition, perturbation metadata, sequencing QC, and consistency across runs become first-class scientific constraints. You will work directly with model partners on screen co-design, and with our software and intelligence teams on how the resulting data flows back into customer pipelines and into Substrate's own data factory. You will also be the executive partner to the co-founders on anything functional-genomics related: the screening roadmap, the proprietary functional genomics dataset programme on the reserved fraction of lab capacity, and the customer conversations where functional genomics depth is decisive. What you will do in your first twelve months PHASE 0: NOW TO AUG 2026 Land in the lab. Set up workspace at our King's Cross site and start manual screen development. Scope the day-1 wedge against early customer demand: which cell line, which perturbation library, which sequencing readout, validated as one end-to-end workflow before the menu starts to expand. Hire the first Principal Scientist and Lab Technician alongside you. Define the roles, run the processes, close the offers. PHASE 1: SEP TO DEC 2026 Develop and validate the first screens manually. Set the reproducibility and quality thresholds that will serve as acceptance criteria for the moves to instrumented and to fully autonomous execution. Co-design protocols with the software and automation engineering teams so that the manual versions you validate are automation-ready by design. Decide which manual judgement calls have to be engineered out before they hit a workcell. Begin co-design conversations with the first commercial customers, including the foundation model partners coming online from mid-2027. PHASE 2: JAN TO MAR 2027 Workcells arrive in the lab. Move the validated screens onto them, running with instrumentation and human intervention in the loop ahead of full autonomous operation later in 2027. Validate equivalence against the manual baselines. Grow the team. Bring on the second Principal Scientist and the first scientists at the bench to support throughput as the screening menu opens to customers. Ship the first revenue on the functional genomics vertical from manual and semi-automated services. Who you are You are an experienced functional genomics scientist who has built or led a screening function at a biotech, pharma R&D, or CRO. You are comfortable in the detail at the bench and you are comfortable setting direction for a team. The shape of the problem is what attracts you: a screening portfolio that has to be designed for autonomous execution from day one, in a business where the data the lab produces is itself part of the product. You have hired and managed scientists, principal scientists, and technicians. You have set quality thresholds and held people to them. You have run screens that supported real customers, internal teams in pharma or biotech or external customers in a CRO setting, and you understand what enterprise-grade scientific operations look like. You are pragmatic about being hands on at the bench in the first six to nine months, and excited about the team you will build behind you. You enjoy interviewing, hiring, mentoring, and setting standards. You will be in the lab at our King's Cross site at the cadence the science demands. That cadence will be heavy in the manual development phase and ease as the function grows and protocols move onto instrumentation. You are comfortable with that. MUST HAVE Seven or more years of experience in functional genomics or related disciplines (target validation, perturbation screening), with at least three in a senior or team leading role at a biotech, pharma R&D, or CRO. End to end hands on experience in at least one screening modality (typically CRISPR knockout or CRISPRi knockdown), covering cell line preparation, library design, screen execution, and sequencing readout, with working familiarity across single cell readouts and validation workflows. Track record of leading a small scientific team end to end: hiring, setting quality standards, and managing performance against scientific outputs. Customer facing experience, either as a CRO scientific lead working with external customers, or as a pharma or biotech scientist embedded with internal customer teams. NICE TO HAVE Hands on experience in cell line engineering, particularly iPSC differentiation or CRISPR edited stable cell line generation. Direct experience moving screens from manual workflows onto lab automation platforms. Familiarity with structured experimental data capture, LIMS, ELN, or analogous data infrastructure. Experience working with computational or AI/ML colleagues on closed loop perturbation programmes. Background at an AI native biotech or foundation model company. Why this is unusual Most senior functional genomics roles in industry sit either inside a pharma R&D group (slow iteration, internal customers only), inside a CRO (external customers, faster iteration, but optimised for service throughput rather than scientific decisions about screen design), or inside an AI native biotech (fast iteration, but a single internal customer in the company's own pipeline). This is none of the three. You will be designing a screening menu that has to be automation ready from the first manual experiment, working with foundation model labs on closed loop programmes that do not have a precedent in any of those settings, and owning the proprietary dataset programme that turns the lab itself into a commercial asset. It is also a functional genomics role with significant software and AI surface area. Your design decisions affect what the orchestrator has to do, what data flows back to model partners, and which manual judgements get re engineered out of the workflow . click apply for full job details