PhD Physics, 4 yoe postdoc at NIH in experimental biophysics cancer research, fellowship at The Data Incubator (summer 2019 DC), 3 yoe Sr Data Scientist at small govcon doing document information extraction, NER, NLP, knowledge graphs, etc, 2 yoe Graph Data Scientist at mid size govcon working on knowledge graphs, graph analytics, RAG, etc. plus anomaly detection, SBA on spark clusters. Active TS-SCI.

Decided recently to take an interview for a startup doing NLP document analysis project with a $99 million 5 year contract awarded last month (I am currently unsure but suspect that means *up to* 99m, 5 years) , that is looking for a hands-on lead engineer to build out a team for this project. 

I have worked as a PI on a SBIR before and have a fair bit of leadership from mentoring and teaching in academia, but haven't led big teams before or built a big team. However I am confident  I can deliver a lot for this company.

I feel like an excellent fit and have no idea what to negotiate. The recruiter actually gave me a "top range" of 240-300k but it seems like they could and should go way higher for someone with my background. Please share your opinions!