Amodo Design
Entrepreneur in Residence – Product & Spinouts
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Amodo - Entrepreneur in Residence
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 an Entrepreneur in Residence to turn Amodo’s engineering work into products and companies. You’ll launch products we’ve already built, identify new market opportunities, and shape how we grow beyond contracting—whether that’s through direct product sales, new business lines, or spinouts.
Why this role matters
Before I started Amodo, I firmly believed that only product companies were cool. I was wrong. Contracting turns out to be a fantastic model for deep tech venture creation. Working across dozens of clients, our engineers get up to speed with entire industries and pattern-match across sectors. They see real customer problems—and get paid to solve them. They witness the full product cycle over and over again. And crucially, they accumulate a bank of product ideas with built-in market validation.
This isn’t a new idea. In the previous century, contract R&D was an important way that companies were formed. MIT’s Technology Plan made the university’s staff and facilities available to local industry for contract research and the firms that grew out of MIT affiliates in this period include Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Gillette, Arthur D. Little, Koch Industries, McDonnell Douglas, and Rockwell International. Cambridge Consultants spun out 27 companies, including four unicorns, and seeded most of the deep tech ecosystem in Cambridge, UK.
Amodo now runs dozens of engineering projects at any one time. We see repeated patterns—the same bottleneck appearing across multiple clients, a prototype that could become a product, a technology that deserves its own company. But commercialising these opportunities requires a different skillset to delivering engineering projects. That’s where you come in.
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What you’ll do
Your mission: Find the products and businesses hiding in our engineering work.
- Launch products from day one. We’ve already developed three scientific instruments that are ready for market. They’re niche products, but real. In your first three months, you’ll own the full go-to-market: positioning, pricing, sales channels, first customers. You’ll learn our technology, our team, and our customers by actually selling to them.
- Spot what’s next. Immerse yourself in our project portfolio. Sit in on client calls, review technical work, talk to our engineers. Identify where we’re solving problems that could become products—particularly where we see the same need across multiple customers. Find the niches worth pressing into.
- Over your first six months, you’ll map out where Amodo should go next. That might mean proposing a new “field” for Amodo to build expertise in—like we’ve done with biosecurity and AI hardware. It might mean a new business model. Or it might mean a spinout that deserves its own company and founding team.
- Launch a spinout. When you find an opportunity that deserves its own company, you’ll make it happen. Validate the market, build the founding team—whether that’s Amodo engineers ready to make the leap or external founders—and work with them through early setup: fundraising strategy, legal structure, initial customers. You won’t necessarily run the companies yourself, but you’ll be the person who gets them off the ground.
- Shape how we grow. This is a new function for Amodo. You’ll help us figure out when something should be an Amodo product vs. a spinout, how to structure new business lines, and how we balance contracting with product revenue.
About you
Must-haves:
- Entrepreneurial drive with a track record of building things—whether that’s companies, products, or initiatives that required operating without a playbook
- Commercial instincts: you can look at a technology and quickly assess whether there’s a viable business, who would pay, and why
- Enough technical fluency to engage deeply with engineers and understand what makes a hardware product defensible
- Willing to do the unglamorous work: you’ll be writing sales emails, chasing invoices, and figuring out shipping logistics alongside the strategic thinking
- Comfort with ambiguity: this role doesn’t have a template, and you’ll be figuring it out as you go
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Strong additions:
- Experience founding, co-founding, or being an early employee at a hardware or deep tech startup
- Sales or business development experience, particularly in technical or scientific markets
- Engineering or scientific training, even if you’ve since moved to commercial roles
- Background in venture building, product management, or commercialising R&D
- A network in UK deep tech, scientific instrumentation, or adjacent sectors
You don’t need to have done this exact role before. We’re looking for someone who can sell niche scientific products today and spot the next big opportunity tomorrow.
What is it like to work at Amodo?
Our values: Truth-seeking, excellent, enthusiastic, kind, humble, and always learning
Our approach: We think before diving in, iterate fast, and focus on the highest-impact 80/20 work. We favour rapid experimentation, quick feedback loops, and sprinting to “something that works” rather than over-planning.
Feedback culture: We practice radical candor, which means being clear and direct while staying kind, and welcoming feedback at every level
No “not my job”-ism: If we see something wrong, we fix it. If your part of a project is going great and another is struggling, don’t settle for polishing a chunk of a struggling ship
Socials: Table tennis every lunch, personal project evenings, pub trips, trail running club, and more
We are based in a spacious, modern office in central Sheffield, with a fully equipped workshop where we design, prototype, build, and test our hardware. Expansion to a new London office is also in progress. You can apply for either location through our application form.
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