Forward Deployed Lead

About Prima Mente

Prima Mente is a frontier biology AI lab. We generate our own data, build general purpose biological foundation models, and translate discoveries into research and clinical outcomes. Our first goal is to tackle the brain: to deeply understand it, protect it from neurological disease, and enhance it in health. Our team of AI researchers, experimentalists, clinicians, and operators is based in London, San Francisco and Dubai.

Role Focus

As our first Forward Deployed Scientist, embed our flagship model Pleiades with early partners – testing possible research outcomes and product hypotheses and lead the build out of our FDS model.

What you’ll do

• Design, lead and own our Forward Deployment function.
• Directly manage our end‑to‑end customer implementation strategy and execution.
• Embed with early design partners (research institutes, enterprise users, clinics, healthcare providers) to deeply understand their use‑cases for cfDNA fragment analysis, epigenetic embedding, multi‑omic integration, diagnostic reporting, patient‑specific risk stratification.
• Translate real‑world problems into concrete, deployable solutions – designing and building custom pipelines, data ingestion, model integration, and output handling tailored to each customer’s environment.
• Act as the primary technical owner, build trust and guide the customer’s own teams.
• Establish deployment “best practices”, find reusable patterns.
• Feed what you learn from deployments back into the R&D roadmap: help prioritize model improvements, new features, and research directions.

Who you are

We don’t expect you to check every box. Strong applicants often have depth in some of these and interest in growing into others.

• Deep customer fluency and empathy: able to explain a complex system to a non‑technical executive and understand their business problem. You translate business needs into technical specs.
• Deep technical fluency: strong programming/scripting skills (Python, or equivalent), able to build bioinformatics pipelines, fine‑tune and integrate ML models into production environments.
• Experience building tools or frameworks for ML/AI workloads (data pipelines, infrastructure, modular/reusable code, CI/CD for ML, monitoring).
• Bias for moving fast, iteration, and scope adjustment to the most useful thing we can do, given constraints.
• Comfort with ambiguity and early‑stage work: able to navigate messy, incomplete data; iterate quickly; improvise tools; and own the entire deployment stack end‑to‑end.
• Prior experience deploying ML/AI in regulated or high‑stakes environments (clinical labs, healthcare, diagnostics, enterprise).
• Familiarity with compliance and data governance (e.g. data anonymization, GDPR, audit‑ability, provenance).

Expected Growth

Month One

• Identify target users and their biggest value areas.
• Define deployment roadmaps and MVP pathways to support pre‑sales.
• Understand Pleiades capacity, potential and opportunities.
• Develop key relationships with engineering, product and commercial teams.

Month Three

• Agree on and build validation criteria.
• Whiteboard and prototype ideas with synthetic data in conjunction with product and engineering teams.
• Build evals and features with user input and labeling, helping client teams to adopt and maximise value from the deployment.
• Optimise the model to perform better on previously‑defined quality checks.
• Act as onsite deployment owner for the first deployment, ensuring learning is captured for future deployments.

Month Six

• Ongoing deployment is fully managed.
• Roadmap of learnings and development of SOP for future deployments is part of our knowledge base.
• Customer feedback scores support bids for future deployments.
• Feedback from case studies has been implemented to improve our internal models.

Location

Based onsite in San Francisco, US or London, UK. This role will travel frequently and become hybrid/on‑site embed/customer‑site embed as needed.

Culture Insight

Prima Mente is a place where great people get to tackle great challenges together. We’re innately curious, fundamentally hands‑on and passionate about excellence. Together we are building an environment where outstanding communication, scientific rigour and creative innovation come together to effect impact at pace. Come build the world’s frontier AI biology lab with us. We arrange our lives so we can work in person as much as possible.