Field Lead – Biosecurity

Amodo is a hardware engineering company building the 21st century’s most important technologies. Our team of mechanical, electronic, firmware, and software engineers works with world-leading startups, universities, governments, and philanthropists to solve pressing technical challenges. We believe in differential technology development: deliberately accelerating safety-enhancing technologies to ensure human flourishing.

We’re looking for a Field Lead to own and drive our biosecurity engineering workstream. You’ll be responsible for scoping, shaping, and helping deliver engineering projects that make the world more resilient to pandemic threats. This is a high-autonomy role at the intersection of hardware engineering and biosecurity strategy, with scope to build relationships across the field and guide millions of pounds of R&D effort.

Why this role matters

Cities used to burn. Then we engineered fire out of existence—not through braver firefighters, but through building codes, fire-resistant materials, detection systems, and suppression technologies. Today, fire departments respond to a thousand home fires a day in the US, but they almost never spread beyond a single structure.

Pandemics are where urban fire was two centuries ago. Advances in synthetic biology and AI are making engineered pathogens more accessible, while our defences rely on the same basic playbook: detect, develop countermeasures, distribute.

We believe that the physical sciences (physics, engineering, and chemistry) hold the solution to many biosecurity problems, but they still remain underexplored. Our team of engineers has worked on Far-UV modelling, new models of air purifiers, and testing of respirators. We plan to expand this work and explore new, neglected biosecurity solutions.

This is the only role that we know of that combines working on biosecurity strategy and having access to a world-leading engineering team to back up your work.

What you’ll do

Your mission: Be the engineering force multiplier that the biosecurity field needs.

• Scope engineering projects. Meet with biosecurity researchers, startups, and funders. Understand their technical challenges. Turn these into comprehensive engineering work plans, scopes, and specifications that Amodo can deliver.
• Build the network. Become the person biosecurity organisations call when they have a hardware problem. Within months, you should know the key players at organisations, and they should know you.
• Spot the gaps. Identify where engineering bottlenecks are holding back critical interventions. Propose projects that could unlock progress on UV air disinfection, pathogen detection systems, PPE innovation, or other high-priority areas.
• Help deliver. Work alongside Amodo’s engineers to ensure projects succeed. Be the technical point of contact for biosecurity clients, translating between domain expertise and engineering execution.
• Shape the field. Your work will directly influence which biosecurity technologies get built. Done well, this role could help determine how tens of millions of pounds in biosecurity R&D gets spent.

About you

We value drive, culture fit, and a track record of exceptional achievement above all else, but the competencies, interests, and attributes below are highly desirable:

Must-haves:

• Strong technical foundations in a STEM field, with the ability to rapidly learn new domains from first principles
• Entrepreneurial and independent, with a track record of taking projects from concept to completion without hand-holding
• Charisma and communication skills that let you context-switch between engaging with academic researchers, briefing funders, and working with engineers
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity—you can take an ill-defined problem, break it down, and drive it to completion

Strong additions:

• Experience designing and building hardware systems, particularly in scientific instrumentation, medical devices, or related fields
• Existing relationships or experience in biosecurity, public health, or pandemic preparedness
• A track record of building relationships that surface real information—experts share their actual uncertainties with you, not just polished talking points
• Experience scoping or managing engineering projects across multiple technical domains
• Published work, open-source contributions, or side projects demonstrating technical depth

You do not need existing biosecurity expertise. The core skills are rapid learning, relationship building, and engineering judgment. Domain knowledge can be acquired; these other competencies are harder to teach.