Head of Functional Genomics
Role Summary
Substrate Bio seeks a Head of Functional Genomics to lead a new vertical focusing on AI-driven biological discovery in London.
About the Organisation
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 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. Some scientists find that energising; some find it outside their lane. Worth knowing in advance which one you are.
Minimum Requirements
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.
- 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.
- 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.
Working Conditions
We pay competitively against the London market for senior functional genomics scientists at venture-backed companies, calibrated to seniority and to the specific scope of this role. We will discuss numbers with serious candidates after first conversations.
Equity is meaningful, with vesting on the standard four-year schedule and a one-year cliff. We can talk through the philosophy and the maths in detail when we meet.
Application Information
Apply via Ashby with whatever you think shows your work best: a CV, a published paper or technical report you are proud of, an example of an assay you have taken from idea to validated workflow. We read everything that comes in.
Our process is three stages. An initial conversation with Alexey to understand what you want from the role and what we want from it. Followed by a technical session covering your. scientific track record, the assay menu you would build, and how you would build and lead the protein science team. Finally, an in-person founder-team session at our King’s Cross site covering scope, terms, and any final questions. We aim to move fast on candidates we are excited about; expect roughly two to three weeks end to end.
If you are not sure whether you are a fit, send a note anyway to ----- The most useful conversations we have had so far have been with people who were not sure.
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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Eligibility Criteria
Candidates are required to have expertise in functional genomics, with an emphasis on AI-integrated biological research.
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