Community Manager

Job description

The opportunity The researchers, data scientists, and ML engineers driving AI-driven biological discovery do not yet know Substrate exists. The Community Manager is the person who will change that. This is Substrate's first dedicated community hire. You will build from scratch: the relationships, the channels, the content, the events, and the feedback loops that turn a network of interested researchers into an active, technically engaged community. You will be the external face of Substrate to the AI x biology research world, and the voice of that world inside Substrate. About Substrate Substrate is building and operating a network of fully autonomous wet laboratories. We are the critical infrastructure layer for AI-driven biological discovery: cloud-based data production facilities, tightly integrated with AI foundation models, that make high-quality experimental biology as accessible as compute. We are a small team, four co-founders and a founding hire class now building out, with venture funding and government grants, opening our first node in London and a second node in San Francisco in parallel. The work is hard and the timeline is compressed. We have two scientific verticals live (protein characterisation and functional genomics), a software platform that connects API calls to automated assay execution, and a commercial pipeline that spans foundation model labs, AI biotechs, pharmaceutical companies, and publicly funded research organisations. We are growing to roughly thirty people by early 2027. The role You will own Substrate's community function end to end. The immediate priority is establishing Substrate's presence in the communities where our most important potential users and customers already spend time: AI-biology conferences, academic research groups, frontier AI lab developer communities, and the broader open-science data ecosystem. The obvious operational pieces are real and important: building and managing Substrate's community channels, creating content (technical posts, case studies, event recaps) that demonstrates what the platform can do, representing Substrate at conferences and research events, and tracking engagement in ways that help the commercial, product and science teams make decisions. Two parts of the role are less standard, and they are why this hire matters so much to Substrate's success. The first is technical credibility…