Sam Francis

Client Solutions Associate Director

Connect with Sam

Sam joined BioTalent in May 2025, specialising in embedded recruitment, retained, and contingency search for AI- and GenAI-led biotech, biopharma, and biomedical companies across the UK, EU, and US. With over 15 years of experience, he has worked with leading organisations including AstraZeneca, GSK, Citeline, and Bioptimus, where he built the recruitment function onsite.

He focuses on supporting start-ups and scaleups to secure top talent across technical, product, commercial, and operational roles, with particular strength in France and the US. Sam works closely with founders, senior leaders, and venture capital partners from pioneering companies such as Owkin, Sofinnova, InstaDeep, Isomorphic Labs, and Singular. Passionate about the transformative potential of AI in life sciences, he believes technologies such as GenAI and large language models will play a critical role in early disease detection and accelerating treatments to market.

Outside of work, Sam is a keen sports enthusiast with a love for football and rugby. A proud father of two boys, he enjoys coaching his son's football team and spending quality time with his family.

Blogs by Sam

Building the future: Recruiting for foundation models, GenAI and LLMs in biology

Sam Francis, Associate Director at BioTalent, on the skills and talent strategies reshaping foundation model, GenAI and LLM hiring in biology.

Industry intelligence

Latest jobs by Sam

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AI Research Scientist

AI Research Scientist – Biological Foundation Models 📍 Paris (hybrid) | 💰 €80,000–€100,000 + equity We’re partnering with an innovative deeptech company at the forefront of AI-driven drug discovery in immunology . Their mission is to tackle one of the biggest challenges in pharma R&D — bridging the gap between preclinical research and clinical success using cutting-edge foundation models. This is a unique opportunity to work on large-scale, multimodal biological data and contribute to a next-generation AI platform designed to predict patient outcomes and accelerate therapeutic development. The Role As an AI Research Scientist , you will design, train, and scale deep learning models applied to complex biological systems. You’ll work on multimodal transformer architectures across transcriptomics, histology, and clinical data — pushing the boundaries of biological foundation models. You’ll collaborate closely with a multidisciplinary team of ML researchers, computational biologists, and immunologists, translating model outputs into real-world impact across drug discovery and development. What You’ll Be Doing Design and train transformer-based foundation models on large-scale biological datasets Develop pre-training and fine-tuning strategies across species, tissues, and diseases Work on multimodal learning (omics, imaging, clinical data) Run scaling experiments and optimise model performance Contribute to and lead publications in top-tier ML and computational biology venues Apply models to real-world challenges: target validation, biomarker discovery, and patient stratification What We’re Looking For PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or similar 3+ years’ experience in deep learning research Strong publication record (e.g. NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI) Expert Python skills with PyTorch experience Experience training models on large-scale datasets Nice to Have Experience with biological or multi-omics data Background in foundation models, self-supervised or multimodal learning Experience training large-scale models (>300M parameters) Comfortable working in fast-paced, high-growth environments If you’re excited about applying cutting-edge AI to solve real-world biological problems, this is a rare opportunity to make a tangible impact in drug discovery. Feel free to reach out for more details or a confidential discussion.

PermanentHybridEU

Essonne, France

Posted about 1 month ago

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