Functional Genomics Scientist

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.

Most functional genomics bench 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 developing screens that have to be automation-ready from the first manual experiment, working alongside foundation model labs on closed-loop programmes that do not have a precedent in any of those settings, and contributing to 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. The way you design and run screens affects what the orchestrator has to do, what data flows back to model partners, and which manual judgements get re-engineered out of the workflow. Some scientists find that energising; some find it outside their lane. Worth knowing in advance which one you are.

You are a functional genomics scientist who is excited about doing the actual work — designing, running, validating, and iterating on screens at the bench. You are comfortable in the detail. You have done at least one screening modality end to end. The shape of the problem is what attracts you: screens that have 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 write good SOPs. You hold yourself and your colleagues to clear reproducibility thresholds. You are pragmatic about being hands-on in the early phase, with cadence that will be heavy in the manual development phase and ease as protocols move onto instrumentation. You enjoy working at the boundary with non-biologist colleagues — automation engineers, software engineers, AI researchers — and you do not require them to be scientifically fluent before you will collaborate with them.

We are hiring across three tiers — Lab Technician, Scientist, and Principal Scientist. The shape of the work is hands-on bench science at all levels, with collaboration into automation and software. The difference is depth of ownership, design authority, and team responsibility.

We pay competitively against the London market for functional genomics scientists at venture-backed companies, with bands calibrated to seniority and to the specific scope of the role. We will discuss numbers with serious candidates after first conversations.

Options on the standard four-year vest with a one-year cliff. The specific quantum varies by seniority and we will discuss it with serious candidates.

Apply via Ashby with whatever you think shows your work best: a CV, a published paper or technical report you are proud of, a protocol you have written, a problem you fixed at the bench that you think makes the point. We read everything that comes in.