Financial Controller

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 financial controller to build the finance function from scratch. Substrate is a deeply unusual finance problem: significant capital expenditure on workcells and lab infrastructure, large parallel grant programmes, a venture round, and a usage-priced commercial model that translates physical lab capacity into customer cost. You will own how we account for it, how we price it, and how we explain it to investors and grant funders.

About Substrate

Substrate is spinning out of Automata, the UK lab automat...