New Product and Partners Field Applications Scientist in Oxford

Oxford Nanopore Technologies aims to bring the widest benefits to society through enabling the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere. The company has developed a new generation of nanopore‑based sensing technology for faster, information‑rich, accessible and affordable molecular analysis. The first application is DNA/RNA sequencing, and the technology is in development for the analysis of other types of molecules including proteins. The technology is used to understand and characterise the biology of humans and diseases such as cancer, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses, and whole environments.

We’re looking for a New Product & Partners Field Applications Scientist team to join our Global Services function. In this role you will be working within a cross‑functional team to provide high‑quality technical expertise for our development, evaluation and closed early‑access projects with a view to optimise our new product testing and iteration process. This is a 12‑month fixed‑term contract to support a maternity leave and up to 70% travel is expected.

The successful candidate will collaborate closely with customers, prospective clients, key opinion leaders, and external partners in the clinical and applied field to provide technical support for all products in early‑access and early commercialising phases. This role requires adept troubleshooting, excellent verbal and written communication, effective time‑management, situational awareness, poise under pressure and the ability to work collaboratively. You will be expected to build and maintain strong relationships with customers and colleagues in Services, Global Support, Product Management, Engineering, Sales, Marketing and Regulatory and Quality Control.

• Managing developer, evaluations and early‑access customer and partner relationships from a technical perspective.
• Coordinate, manage, and deliver training, demonstrations, and solution evaluations with external partners and beta sites.
• Working with customers in their labs to run the new workflows end‑to‑end to gather good quality feedback on product performance, usability, etc.
• Provide direct technical support to customers and partners during early‑access phases, including assistance with setup, optimisation, workflow implementation, validation, and data analysis.
• Collaborate with local FAS, Applications, Sample Tech, R&D, Applied Bioinformatics, Regulatory, and Product Management teams as needed.
• Establish a communication and visit plan for each assigned customer or partner, ensuring regular interaction based on project milestones, support requirements, and ONT business priorities.
• Provide scientific and application feedback to internal teams to improve workflows and support the use of ONT platforms in alignment with business objectives.
• Share responsibility for the completion of projects with external partners according to agreed timelines.
• Contribute to internal product evaluations, experimental design, product usability projects, and customer‑facing documentation.
• Providing strategic and competitive feedback to the marketing, sales and product development teams.
• Recording and documenting relevant information from all customer interactions into ONT’s CRM.
• Creating and maintaining dashboards to provide management and colleagues easy access to summary‑level account/assay performance.
• Providing technical consultations on products and related applications as part of the regional sales cycle.
• Participate in conferences, seminars, and webinars relevant to assigned projects.
• Collaborate with Global Support and Technical Enablement teams to develop technical documentation and train global technical services teams.

You will have a solid background of lab experience with proven knowledge and understanding of genetics, molecular biology, cell biology and related fields as well as theoretical knowledge and practical experience of novel experimental design, appropriate sample preparation methodologies (DNA isolation, fragmentation, etc.) and appropriate data analysis. You should be used to working in a fast‑paced, multi‑tasking environment with the ability to effectively work on and manage many priorities at one time. Your communication and interpersonal skills are a key strength and you’re able to work effectively both with internal departments and internationally, and fluency in other languages would be advantageous.

We expect you to have a PhD in life sciences or equivalent commercial experience. Commercial experience should be in a support or customer‑facing role. You’re a confident presenter and comfortable presenting, teaching or training other scientists and have excellent troubleshooting, writing and editing skills. You’re a competent user of Microsoft Office and ideally will have used SalesForce or a similar CRM database. Experience working in a regulated environment would be desirable, either clinical or BioPharma, and you should have a keen eye for project management.

This is a fixed‑term contract for one year with ONT, covering a period of maternity leave.