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 f...