substrate-bio - Head of Functional Genomics
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.
Responsibilities
• 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. • You will initially report to Alexey Morgunov, our science and AI focused co-founder. We are recruiting a Founding Biology Lead, the co-founder who will own scientific operations across the verticals; once they join, your reporting line will likely move to them. You will work most closely with the Head of Protein Science, who is being hired alongside you, and with the software and automation engineering teams on the boundary between scientific protocols and autonomous execution. • You are the first protein-science hire. Substrate is currently three co-founders growing to roughly 32 people by the end of Q1 2027. • 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 [email protected]. The most useful conversations we have had so far have been with people who were not sure.
Benefits
• 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. • 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. • Working pattern is hybrid with a strong in-person bias dictated by the lab. In the manual development phase you will be at our King’s Cross site most days; this eases as the function grows, principal scientists are in seat, and protocols move onto instrumentation. Most of the founding team are in the office most days regardless. 30 days annual leave. A learning budget you can use for conferences, courses, books, and time. The founding team operates on a weekly cadence with a Monday planning meeting and a Friday close, and a quarterly offsite. We are direct with each other, we write things down, and we expect to be challenged.
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