Community Manager

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.

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.

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.

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.

We sponsor visas for exceptional candidates at both the London and San Francisco locations. How we work

Hybrid, with a strong bias toward in-person time at your base location. London candidates are expected to be in person at our King's Cross lab and office most working days during the first six months; San Francisco candidates are expected to be in person at the SF node on a similar basis once the node is operational. Remote days are available and we are sensible about it, but this is a relationship-intensive role and the in-person time matters. 30 days annual leave. A learning and development budget. Quarterly offsites. We are building the rest of the benefits package as the team arrives.

Apply via Ashby. Include a short message describing who you are, why this role makes sense for you now, and what you think the hardest part of building a technical research community from scratch will be is more useful to us than a cover letter.

Attach your CV, and, if you have produced content you are proud of, a link to it.

Our process is three stages: a first conversation with Anna, a short content task, and a founder team session in person.

If you are not certain you are a fit, send a note anyway. The community for Substrate has not been built; we are as interested in how you think about what it should be as we are in your experience doing something similar.

Substrate is an equal opportunity employer. We make hiring decisions on merit, scope-fit, and the strength of the working relationship we expect to build with each hire. Applications welcome from candidates of any background.

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