Application Scientist

Unicorn Biotechnologies; Sheffield; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 85,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Real influence

Pension with SIPP

Team lunches

Conference attendance

Autonomy culture

R&D facility access

Job summary

Unicorn Biotechnologies, based in Sheffield, is seeking an Application Scientist to serve as the scientist's voice within an engineering team. You will design experiments, run pilot studies, and deliver on-site demos to help clients implement our platform.

You will train customers, diagnose whether issues are biology, process, or instrument related, and feed learnings back to product development. We value clear thinking, autonomy, and the ability to explain complex results to scientists and

Qualifications

• Prior customer-facing experience: field applications, technical support, pilot studies, demos, or training.
• Experience designing experiments within a commercial environment focused on product development objectives.
• Hands-on mammalian cell culture experience with various cell types.

Responsibilities

• Design and execute experimental workflows to test devices and subsystems, providing feedback to engineering.
• Manage customer projects: pilots, feasibility studies, onboarding customer protocols onto the platform.
• Deliver demonstrations and technical evaluations for prospects at client sites and on site.
• Onboard and train new customers, SOPs, and troubleshooting guides with installed systems.
• Act as scientific escalation point for deployed systems and drive resolutions.

Skills

Customer-facing

Experiment design

Scientific communication

Problem solving

Autonomy

Education

PhD or MSc in a relevant field

Biology/biotech background

Tools

Lab instruments

Bioreactors

AI tooling experience

Job description

Anticipated start date: As soon as possible

Full-time, On-site, Sheffield, UK (national and international travel required)

Do you want to utilise your scientific skills to make a real-world impact?We are developing a platform to help solve all disease, not just one area from cancer biology through to cardiological conditions and beyond.

AI Science and Autonomous Labs are buzzwords, we are actually building the necessary infrastructure, hardware and software tooling to enable scientists to design, execute and analyse experiments without human intervention. We already work with global biopharma companies and the most ambitious organisations you will have heard of.

We need an application scientist to be the scientist's voice inside an engineering development group and to help our clients implement our solutions to accelerate their scientific programs.

Our engineers build the instruments. You are the person who decides whether what they have built actually works, because you understand the problem we are automating, and who helps our clients create solutions to the problems they are actually trying to solve. Those two halves feed each other. What you learn delivering on-site demos, pilot projects and training for a customer is exactly what you carry back into the next engineering review.

WE VALUE

• Scientists who can tell an engineer no and explain why in terms the engineer can act on.
• Clear thinking, pragmatism, and sound judgment.
• The ability to explain a complex result plainly, to a scientist and to a customer.
• Friendly, organised, efficient, and enthusiastic people with a can-do attitude.
• People who take responsibility and follow problems through.
• An aptitude for quickly learning new skills.
• Using the right tools, including AI, to work smarter, not harder.
• Low-ego individuals who go above and beyond to help the team succeed.

THE ROLE

You'll work directly with the company Founders and our technical team leads to help onboard, train and support our clients implementing solutions to their hardest problems. In plain English, that means:

• Designing and executing experimental workflows that test our devices and their subsystems, and providing your feedback to our engineering team, as part of product development.
• Managing customer projects: running pilot and feasibility studies at our lab and onboarding a customer's protocols and process onto our platform.
• Delivering demonstrations and technical evaluations for prospects, at our site and at theirs.
• Onboarding and training new customers, SOPs, and troubleshooting guides that go with an installed system.
• Being the scientific escalation point for deployed systems: diagnosing whether a problem is biology, process, or instrument, and driving it to a resolution.

You'll have high autonomy and direct influence on what we build. The learning curve is steep, but you'll expand your skills faster here than in most environments, and your work will tangibly impact and support other scientists doing meaningful research and work.

NEED TO HAVE

• Prior customer-facing experience: field applications, technical support, pilot studies, demos, or training.
• Experience designing experiments within a commercial environment, where speed and efficiency to test only the hypotheses that advance our product development or our client’s objectives are prioritised.
• Substantial hands-on mammalian cell culture experience culturing a variety of cell types (cell lines, primary cells, pluripotent stem cells).
• The ability to clearly convey your personal perspectives and data-backed technical opinions to our internal engineering teams.
• The ability to build credibility with other scientists and explain your reasoning to both technical and non-specialist stakeholders.
• Comfort working with instrumentation and software as a routine part of the science, not an obstacle.
• Willingness to travel nationally and internationally to customer sites regularly.
• Self-motivation and comfort operating with high autonomy in a small team.

NICE TO HAVE

• Prior experience running standard analytical techniques (DNA/RNA isolation, qPCR, flow cytometry, immunofluorescence staining, image analysis, etc.).
• Prior experience using cell culture automation systems or bioreactors for process development or cell manufacturing.
• Experience being the scientific counterpart to a hardware or software team, and/or prior work in instrumentation development and commercialisation.
• Familiarity using AI tooling (e.g. Claude Science/Code, LLMs) to automate your data analysis, document drafting and general productivity.
• Understanding of regulated environments and why documentation matters in them.
• Prior experience at a startup or scale-up.

While we consider applicants from any relevant background, you will likely have >5 years of relevant industry experience, or a PhD with >2 years of industry experience.

BENEFITS

• Real influence: your verdict on a prototype changes what gets built.
• Direct collaboration with world-class engineers on a product you will see deployed in the real world.
• Pension with SIPP options and support managing your investments if you want it.
• Weekly team pastries and monthly all-hands lunches.
• Conference attendance and professional development support.
• A culture that values autonomy, accountability and responsibility.
• Based in Sheffield, the UK's greenest city, on the doorstep of the Peak District, <15 minutes from our purpose-built R&D and manufacturing facility.

ABOUT US

Unicorn Biotechnologies is building the infrastructure for autonomous cell biology. We combine hardware, software, machine intelligence and biology into powerful, easy-to-use platforms that let scientists and manufacturers standardise, scale, and automate their workflows. We're a Sheffield-based team with deep R&D foundations, now scaling to meet growing demand from our global customer base. You'll have real ownership over your work, genuine influence on product direction, and the chance to shape a company at a scale-up inflection point.

Unicorn Biotechnologies is an equal opportunity employer committed to providing a working environment that embraces inclusion and diversity.