Senior Director, External Research and Development Operations

Summary

Join Curie.Bio as a Senior Director and play a pivotal role in connecting portfolio companies with top-tier vendors. Collaborate closely with internal scientific teams and ensure portfolio companies have seamless access to external vendors. Optimize vendor outreach processes, manage agreements, and communicate the value proposition of CROs to stakeholders. Build and maintain strong relationships with strategic vendor partners, fostering long-term collaborations. Develop and improve processes for data collection, knowledge management, and tool development. Contribute to the design and improvement of scalable processes and infrastructure. This role requires a PhD in Biology or a related field, extensive experience in alliance/vendor/CRO management, and strong interpersonal and negotiation skills.

Requirements

• PhD in Biology or related field with experience in the pharmaceutical or life science industry, ideally as a project lead
• At least 10 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
• 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

Responsibilities

• Work closely with the Curie CSO Co-Pilot from planning to execution ensuring our internal scientific teams 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

Preferred Qualifications

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