substrate-bio - Member of Technical Staff, Physical AI
Requirements
• You have built perception or sensing systems that had to work in the physical world, where the interesting failure modes live: robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, manufacturing, or scientific instruments. You have made cameras and sensors behave (calibration, synchronisation, capture, deployment) and you have put computer vision into production, not just prototypes. You are pragmatic about vision-language models: you have used them in real systems and you know where they break. • You are happy being the person who makes the physical thing actually work, hands on, as an individual contributor. You are comfortable with early-stage ambiguity, with deciding on partial information, and with revisiting decisions when better information arrives. You want to be close to the hardware and close to the science. • ◆ Experience building real-time perception or sensing systems in the physical world (robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, manufacturing, or instrumentation). • ◆ Hands-on experience with cameras and sensors: calibration, synchronisation, capture pipelines, and deployment. • ◆ Production computer vision experience, including vision-language models (VLMs or VLAs) or strong classical CV. • ◆ Strong software engineering, and real comfort at the software-to-hardware boundary. • ◆ Four or more years building systems of this kind. • ◆ Edge deployment and real-time inference on on-site compute (for example Nvidia Jetson or similar). • ◆ Sensor fusion, SLAM, or large-scale time-series and telemetry. • ◆ Exposure to lab automation, scientific instruments, or other regulated physical-data environments. • ◆ Early-stage or founding-engineer experience at a venture-backed company.
Responsibilities
• You will join a founding team of four. Mostafa ElSayed is our CEO, and also the founder and CEO of Automata, the lab-automation company whose hardware our lab runs on. Oli Hoy leads the lab build, the infrastructure software and operations. Alexey Morgunov leads the intelligence software and the science. Anna Huyghues-Despointes leads commercial and partnerships. You will report to our founding software engineer, who owns the infrastructure software, and work alongside the scientists and the intelligence team. We expect to be over 30 people within the year, so you will be early, and it shows in the scope you own. • Screening, then a behavioural and cultural-fit conversation, then a technical session or work sample with the team (including time in person at the London lab), then references.
Benefits
• Most physical-AI roles sit inside robotics or autonomous-vehicle companies, where perception is the product. This is different. Here, perception is the sense organ of a laboratory that runs itself. You will not be detecting pedestrians; you will be catching a pipetting error before it corrupts a dataset that a foundation model will train on, and capturing the provenance that makes that dataset worth training on at all. • You will also sit between software, hardware and biology at the same table. Some engineers find that mix energising; some find it distracting. It is worth knowing in advance which one you are. • Because the work is hands-on, you will spend significant time in the lab at 20 Triton Street, at a minimum of three days a week, where the instruments, robots and sensors are. The rest of the team is distributed across several locations and works flexibly, and we keep a light shared rhythm: a Monday kickoff, a Thursday all-hands, a short daily team sync, and a quarterly offsite. We are a small team that documents in the open and backs the best idea regardless of who has it. • We look after people well. In the UK that means 30 days of annual leave a year plus public holidays, a pension with a 10% employer contribution, and top-tier private health cover with Bupa, with more added as the team grows.
Apply in one click
Upload My Resume
Drop here or click to browse · Tap to choose · PDF, DOCX, DOC, RTF, TXT