Lab Operations Manager

Start free →

Or apply yourself on the official page →

About the role

LOCATION: London · PATTERN: On site, five days a week The opportunity 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. You’d help write them from the first line, with real ownership and a direct line to the founders. Someone has to make sure that our lab is ready every morning: stock on the shelf, deliveries booked in and in the right freezer, equipment serviced, orders placed early enough to matter. That is this role. Most people who run lab operations inherit a system that somebody else designed. You will set one up in a lab that is still being built, and it will still be running when the company is several times its current size. About us 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. The role You will run the day-to-day operations of our lab in London. You will be the person the scientists come to when something is missing, broken, late or lost, and the person who makes sure that happens as rarely as possible. The day-one work is what you would expect. Consumables and stock: knowing what is on the shelf, what is running low, and what needs ordering before anyone notices it is short. Goods in and cold chain: receiving deliveries, booking them in, getting temperature-sensitive material into the right storage quickly, and recording where it went. Equipment: service schedules, calibration records, routine maintenance, and being the contact for engineers when something needs fixing. Suppliers and purchasing: raising orders, chasing them, managing lead times, and running the quote process when we buy something new. And the lab floor itself: waste streams, housekeeping standards, and safety records kept current alongside our health and safety partner. Two parts of the role go beyond a standard lab operations job, and they are why it matters so much here. The first is provenance. we sells the quality and the provenance of its data, which means every experiment carries a record of the decisions behind it, down to the lot of the consumable used and the conditions material was held in. Stock control and goods in are part of that scientific record rather than a back-office task. If a lot number is not captured, the data point is worth less. That part of the record runs through you. The second is that the systems are not written yet. Inventory, goods in, asset registers, ordering, supplier management: none of it exists in a form that will survive the next year. You are not expected to build the software and you are not expected to run the science. We are not looking for a developer or a bench scientist. You are expected to help define what everything else in the lab needs to capture, and to work closely with the science, software and operations teams so that it does get captured, at the point the work happens rather than reconstructed afterwards. Anyone who wants to run an established system will find this uncomfortable. Anyone who wants to shape one will find there is a lot of room. The role will not stay where it starts. The lab in front of you is the first of several. Automation arrives on top of the current setup, functional genomics builds out alongside protein characterisation on the same London site, and a larger production lab follows after that. Each of those changes what lab operations means here, and what you set up for the first one is what the next ones are built on. Your first 90 days FIRST 30 DAYS ◆ Learn the lab and the science that

View the official posting →