Head of UK Lab Operations

About this role

Adaptyv is building an automated lab that lets AI agents run biology experiments. We're entering the era of agentic science where AI models can now design novel proteins, propose hypotheses, and iterate on experimental results. But they can't run the experiments themselves - that's still a manual, months-long process. We're building the infrastructure that gives AI agents access to the physical world. We are one of the fastest growing biotech companies, trusted by leading biopharmas, frontier AI labs, and the techbio companies pushing the field forward.

This is a rare chance to help advance some of the most important work happening in biotech today. Our automated lab is powered by a deep software + hardware stack: lab instruments worth millions of USD reverse-engineered into API-controllable hardware, dozens of devices orchestrated through complex workflows, full observability on everything that happens in the lab, processing pipelines for messy physical-world data, and AI systems that troubleshoot production results and accelerate assay development.

We’re growing rapidly and are hiring for talented people to scale and support the massive demand for AI-driven wet lab experimentation. About the Role Adaptyv is opening a London lab in 2026. You will be the first lab operations hire on the ground and will help take the site from an empty shell to a fully operational, high-throughput protein engineering lab. The lab will run production work for partners such as Anthropic and Boltz alongside a wide range of R&D projects, and give UK biotech companies access to protein production and characterisation at scale.

You will own the operational build-out of the lab: fit-out, instrument installation, infrastructure, supply chain, maintenance, safety, compliance, and the lab operations team. The Lausanne team has already built and runs this setup today, so you will have proven systems and playbooks to work from. Your job is to adapt them to London and make the new site work at the same standard. Once the lab is live, you will run day-to-day lab operations and continuously improve its reliability, capacity, and throughput.