Member of Technical Staff
Substrate Bio
Member of Technical Staff
Substrate Bio
Autonomous AI-driven wet labs for biological experimentation
We're a stealth startup in AI and bio, building infrastructure for data generation. The team is small and elite, the problems are hard, and the foundations are being laid right now. Youʼd help write them from the first line, with real ownership and a direct line to the founders.
AI for biology has a data problem. The data that matters most doesn't exist yet, so we're building the infrastructure to produce it, with quality and traceability built in from day one.
We're in stealth and heads-down on execution. We'll share more about what we're building once you've spoken with the team.
You will build the infrastructure for post-training and reinforcement learning, so that the team can post-train models, benchmark them, and build and train agents. That covers training and post-training runs, inference serving for open and closed models, the systems that run agents through our RL environments, the evaluation harnesses, and the data pipelines that feed them. The stack is used by researchers and by AI agents alike, so it needs clear interfaces that both can use to launch, monitor and debug runs.
You will own each part of the stack end to end, from design and implementation through deployment, documentation and maintenance. You will set its engineering standards, including testing, observability and versioning, and find and remove bottlenecks across training, rollout generation, evaluation runs, data movement and GPU utilisation.
Our data comes from our own experiments and continues to grow over time, so every training run and evaluation needs to be reproducible on each new version of the data and comparable with earlier runs. You will also improve the performance, scalability and reliability of the stack as the team and its workloads grow.
You will report into the intelligence team and work closely with the RL, evaluation and Bio ML researchers and engineers, as well as with the software team responsible for capturing experimental data.
You have built and operated infrastructure that researchers relied on for training, serving or reinforcement learning. A background in biology is not required.
◆ Experience building infrastructure for LLM inference or RL training.
◆ Systems fundamentals, and the ability to profile a slow or failing workload down to its cause.
◆ Hands-on work with GPU clusters, distributed training, model serving or high-throughput inference, including scheduling, utilisation and cost.
◆ Docker, Kubernetes, Ray or Terraform, and long-running jobs with retries, checkpointing and clear failure reporting.
◆ Good judgement on technical trade-offs, such as when a quick prototype is enough and when a system needs to be hardened, simplified or rebuilt.
◆ Clear writing and communication about system design, operational risk and engineering trade-offs.
◆ Fluent Python and daily use of coding agents.
◆ Inference engines such as SGLang or vLLM, and RL training frameworks such as veRL, Miles or TRL.
◆ Agent environment and evaluation frameworks such as Harbor.
◆ Sandboxed execution for agents, such as Firecracker or gVisor.
◆ Compilers, custom kernels or optimisation for specific GPU hardware.
◆ Data versioning and lineage for ML datasets.
◆ Experience building infrastructure for biological or other scientific data.
The role is based in London or San Francisco. We work in the open, write decisions down, and expect each person to own their area and make the calls inside it.
Everyone gets 30 days of annual leave plus local public holidays. In the UK that comes with a pension with a 10% employer contribution and Bupa private health cover; in the US, a 401(k) with matching and health cover. We add to these as the team grows.
Four stages: a screening call, a behavioural interview, an in-person technical session with the team on a real problem from our work, and references.
If you are not sure you fit, apply anyway.
We are 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.
Autonomous AI-driven wet labs for biological experimentation
Substrate Bio operates AI-native data-production infrastructure for biology, connecting computational models with real-world experimentation. The company runs a network of autonomous, robotics-powered wet labs, starting in London with a second planned for San Francisco, running standardized experiments with full provenance, metadata, and quality control. Researchers access the labs via API, submitting experiment parameters and receiving structured data and metadata, while foundation models help design assay selections, cell systems, and gene panels. What sets Substrate Bio apart is its closed feedback loop, where better data improves its models and better models design better experiments. The goal is to make biological experimentation as programmable and scalable as computation itself.
Explore more opportunities at Substrate Bio