Founding Software Engineer
The opportunity
Substrate is building a network of fully autonomous wet labs, cloud-based data production facilities for AI biology, integrated with foundation models to become the critical infrastructure layer for AI-driven biological discovery. Our first node opens in King’s Cross, London, with several integrated workcells and two scientific verticals online by mid-2027. Our customers range from foundation model labs to global pharma.
We are hiring a founding software engineer to lead the team that builds Substrate’s operational software, the system that turns scientific intent into executed lab work, captures every run as structured data, and routes that data back to model training, customer pipelines, and Substrate’s own data factory. This is a player coach role. You will write the first production code for the orchestrator, the customer interface, and the resource management layer, and you will recruit and lead the engineers who come after.