Substrate is building three roles from the ground up: SVP, Engineering, SVP, Growth & Communications, and SVP, People & Operations.
Each person takes full charge of one function from the first day. A team forms around that function later. Right now, the work means understanding the problem space directly, making the calls within it, doing the work personally, and building the foundation a future team will stand on.
Substrate weighs demonstrated ability well above tenure. A strong project, a piece of research, a body of open-source work, a set of experiments, a habit of clear writing: these carry more signal here than a list of past job titles.
Pay is ₹1,000 a month, alongside planned equity of 1%. That equity vests across four years with a one-year cliff, formalized once Substrate incorporates. Monthly pay covers the specific work agreed for that month, and arrives once that work is done. Given the pay, these roles ask for limited hours, real ownership, and reliability, rather than a full-time commitment.
1) SVP, Engineering
Summary
Leads engineering and AI at Substrate, building the systems that let AI understand medical documents, medical machinery, and eventually reason across both, alongside the software Substrate builds along the way.
Description
This person builds Substrate's core technical work, moving through it in stages as the company grows.
The starting point is medical documents: training, fine-tuning, and adapting open models to read clinical reports, prescriptions, notes, and patient histories, including handwriting and difficult layouts. This covers dataset design, evaluation systems that surface accuracy and failure patterns, and documented, repeatable experiments, alongside the infrastructure and serving work needed to run all of it reliably.
From there, the scope widens to medical machinery: a consistent way for AI systems to understand the instruments medicine already runs on, monitors, analysers, imaging systems, and the rest, through a shared protocol rather than each device's own fragmented interface. Early work here stays deliberately contained, built around simulated equipment and read-only interfaces, with permissions, audit trails, and human authorisation built in from the start.
Longer term, this person helps shape Substrate's own foundation model for medicine and biology: one trained around clinical reasoning and uncertainty, built to work across a patient's records, measurements, and the wider scientific literature, rather than a general model fine-tuned toward medical topics.
This person also works directly with the cofounders on what Substrate builds next: brainstorming new software and tools, scoping what is worth building, and turning those ideas into working products alongside the research. Across every stage, this person sets the technical bar Substrate's future engineering and AI teams work against, then helps build those teams.
Requirements
Strong software engineering fundamentals alongside applied ML ability. A working grasp of modern language and multimodal models that goes past calling an API, built through hands-on time with PyTorch, Hugging Face, transformers, fine-tuning, evaluation, or dataset work. Comfort building and running production systems, and comfort reading a paper and building the idea from it. Genuine product instinct, the kind that turns a rough idea into something worth shipping. A formal job history in AI or engineering helps but stays optional. A student with strong, visible projects makes a stronger case than someone with years of loosely related work.
Note
Clinical expertise on the team helps flag medical limitations and shaky assumptions early. This role works in step with that expertise, particularly as the work moves from documents toward machinery and reasoning.
2) SVP, Growth & Communications
Summary
Owns how Substrate reaches, and builds relationships with, the world outside it.
Description
This role takes the science and engineering happening inside Substrate and puts it in front of the right people, in a form they understand. That means running Substrate's presence across the platforms that matter, shaping communication around research and product moments, finding the researchers, physicians, labs, and partners worth talking to, and running real outreach with follow-through. Over time, this person learns what outreach actually moves the needle, builds a repeatable system around it, and grows the team behind it.
Requirements
Genuine strength with people and with language: opening conversations, following through, building relationships, representing Substrate well in a room or an inbox. Writing ability matters. Judgement matters more. What counts here is proof that someone can make people care about serious work and explain complex ideas simply, over a polished marketing résumé.
Note
This role explains technical work on its own terms, resisting the pull toward marketing language Substrate's voice already pushes against.
3) SVP, People & Operations
Summary
Builds the systems that let Substrate's people do good work together.
Description
Early on, this person carries much of what recruiting and internal operations will eventually own as separate teams. That means running the hiring process end to end, sourcing and reading applications, holding first conversations with candidates, coordinating interviews, designing onboarding, and keeping internal records straight. It also means tracking who owns what and by when, spotting operational friction before it repeats, and making sure decisions turn into finished work. As the team grows, this person sets policy where it is needed and builds the function around themselves.
Requirements
Strong organization, sound judgement, clear communication, and follow-through on several moving pieces at once, without needing a nudge. Ease speaking with people, reading candidates well, and handling sensitive conversations with care. HR background helps but stays optional; running a serious student group, recruiting for a project, managing a community, or building operational structure from nothing all count as real evidence.
Note
Part of this role is holding a working environment that stays respectful and accountable, from the very start.
Substrate reads for evidence: a project, a paper, an experiment, a body of writing, a system someone built and ran. Work and deadlines get set clearly at the start of each period, and word ahead of a missed date matters more than the date itself. Given the stage Substrate is at, these three roles carry scope, independence, and a hand in shaping how each function takes form.
To apply, write to hi@substrates.in with the role name and whatever best shows your work.
Substrate is also opening a set of unpaid internship positions. These sit apart from the three SVP roles above and carry smaller scope, though the same standard applies: what someone has built matters more than a formal history. Send a résumé to hi@substrates.in, and Substrate will follow up.
