Executive Director, Automation Operations

Required

• You are equally at home in science and engineering. You have enough scientific depth to engage with biologists and chemists on the substance of their experiments, and enough engineering fluency to specify, challenge, and guide the design of the systems that will run them. You are the person scientists trust to understand what they mean, and the person engineers trust to tell them precisely what to build. You are a platform builder. You have stood up laboratory platforms at biotechnology companies before, and you know the difference between automating a workflow and building a platform: the former solves today’s problem, the latter creates capacity for problems no one has posed yet. You think in terms of architecture, scalability, and operational leverage, and you design systems that outlast their first use case. You are an experienced leader of leaders. You build strong teams, develop managers and senior leaders, set clear priorities across groups with distinct missions, and create an environment of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement. You communicate with equal credibility to bench scientists, engineers, vendors, and executive leadership.
• Postgraduate degree with 15 years of experience, or Bachelor’s degree with 18 years of experience in laboratory automation, scientific instrumentation, or platform engineering in the life sciences.
• 5+ years leading multidisciplinary technical teams and managing managers, including director-level leaders.
• A demonstrated track record of standing up laboratory platforms at biotechnology, pharmaceutical, or life-science companies, from initial concept through scaled production operation.
• Deep working knowledge of both experimental science and engineering practice, with a demonstrated ability to translate scientific needs into engineering requirements and to represent engineering constraints back to scientists.
• Experience owning laboratory operations at scale, including system reliability, service and maintenance programs, and operational metrics.
• Experience transitioning manual, scientist-run workflows into automated production services, including phased rollout, SLA definition, and stakeholder management across research and engineering.
• Experience with integrated laboratory automation systems, including liquid handlers, robotic arms, plate readers, automated imaging systems, and scheduling or orchestration software.
• Familiarity with compound management operations, including compound registration, automated storage and retrieval, plate production, sample tracking, inventory systems, and quality control across diverse modalities (e.g., small molecules, biologics, peptides, and nucleic acids).
• Strong strategic planning and prioritization skills, with the ability to balance production support against long-horizon platform investments.
• Experience managing budgets, capital equipment planning, and vendor relationships.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with credibility across bench scientists, engineers, and executive leadership.