Operations Director jobs in Arlington, MA

Company Overview

Curie.Bio is a founder-focused seed-stage venture firm combined with an industry-grade therapeutics accelerator focused on one thing: helping entrepreneurial founders launch viable therapeutics companies. Curie.Bio does this by giving founders access to a team of the world’s best drug hunters and drug makers, seed capital, and best-of-breed services - everything a founder needs to get from concept to a compelling dataset that enables an awesome Series A financing. In a nutshell, we want founders in control of their own company and focused on their area of expertise and creativity, while we help make the rest happen smoothly.

Curie.Bio was designed by founders for founders. Our founding team of Zach Weinberg, Christoph Lengauer and Alexis Borisy, has collectively helped start numerous therapeutics companies and been intimately involved with the Series A financing of many more. We have witnessed first hand the difficulty of going from a seed stage concept to generating the data package necessary for a successful Series A raise; targets need to be properly selected, experiment plans designed, vendors selected and contracted, experiments need to be run, people need to be hired - all with a few million dollars. These perennial challenges are what led to the creation of Curie.Bio. If we want to dramatically increase the number of viable drug companies created every year - we’re going to have to reduce the complexity of getting to a compelling POC data package required for a Series A. Reducing this complexity requires us to provide real support to these new companies - support that is both strategic (think target selection, unique access to strategic partnerships, early introductions to top Series A investors) and operational (experiment execution, vendor management, back office support). 

As an early employee joining us on this mission, you will see first hand what it takes to successfully bring a company from concept at the seed stage to compelling wet-lab derived POC data with an industry-grade progressible drug (candidate) that enables a Series A financing. You will work alongside the world’s best drug hunters and industry veterans whose experience spans all facets of drug discovery and preclinical drug development - from disease biology to medicinal chemistry, to recruiting, to business development, and more. 

In order for Curie.Bio to achieve its mission, we need the best people. Companies are nothing more than a group of people working together on a shared objective. Great companies are when those individuals come together to form something larger than the sum of its parts. 

The Role

The Senior Director will report to the VP ERAD Operations and be responsible, as part of the External R&D and Partnering team (ERAD), for helping ensure our portfolio companies have access to the absolute best vendors to support them in delivering on their seed milestones. In this role, you will be a part of the connective tissue between our CSO pods that act as co-pilots to our portfolio companies and our external network of vendor partners and CROs. Internally, you will ensure our CSOs and portfolio companies have a white glove working relationship with the top strategic vendors. Externally, you will help build a best in class network of vendors who we treat as long term partners, not transactional order takers. Our ideal candidate is excited by the breadth (majority of modalities/indications), scale, and stage (primarily discovery) of our portfolio.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with the Curie Project Leads from planning to execution ensuring our CSOs and portfolio companies have white glove access to the best external vendors. 
• Support and help optimize vendor outreach processes - from gathering ballpark costs, to RFPs, to memo creation, negotiation, contracting as well as escalating material execution issues that come up along the way
• Support and help optimize the process of managing, executing and tracking CRO-associated agreements (e.g., SOW, MSA, NDA, etc.). 
• Be able to clearly communicate the value proposition of CROs as well as their positioning in the market to internal stakeholders and portfolio companies including which scientific capabilities are typically commoditised and which are cutting edge or rare/difficult to access acting as a guide for founders 
• On specific technology, you are able to access/synthesize/analyze details across the market and then prepare a technical/scientific evaluation memo to support Founders with making the optimum CRO selection
• Help to ensure our strategic vendor partners actually feel like partners. Build a long term relationship with win-win dynamics vs. treating them as a one-off transactional service provider. We want the best teams at the top vendors, which requires building and maintaining deep relationships, trust, and high levels of accountability to ensure both sides deliver on the partnership.
• Help support and continuously develop the processes for maintenance / improvement of the ERAD data collection and knowledge management and contribute to the development/improvements of fit-for-purpose tools. Help manage all CRO-associated presentations, documents and information.
• Help to design, build, and constantly improve the process and infrastructure required to do this at a serious scale. 

Requirements and Qualifications

• PhD in Biology, Chemistry or related field with experience in the pharmaceutical or life science industry, ideally as a project lead 
• At least 5 years experience in Alliance/Vendor/CRO Management or related function with increasing levels of responsibility and demonstrated success in managing external relationships, ideally with discovery stage experience 
• Prior experience or exposure to business development (as part of deal teams for example or through selection and contract negotiations with CROs/CDMOs) is a distinct advantage
• Familiarity with legal agreements in the biopharmaceutical field
• Experience in establishing processes that scale - defining "playbooks" and managing across multiple functions and stakeholders
• Excellent interpersonal skills with ability to negotiate, persuade, resolve conflict, and manage through significant ambiguity and complexity
• Experience managing geographically diverse partners and adaptability towards cultural differences
• Ability to travel 10-40% of the time depending on need