Are you ready to take ownership of Gordian’s unique in vivo screening platform, and drive the generation of transcriptomic data that is at the heart of our discovery efforts? You will be managing an interdisciplinary team of experts with a focus on operational excellence in executing screens, while finding ways for in vivo answers to improve both early and later stages of drug development for complex diseases.
The Destination:
Gordian Biotechnology is a therapeutics company whose mission is to cure age-related diseases and ultimately allow people to lead longer, healthier lives.
Traditional ex vivo screening methods have failed to produce effective treatments, as age-related diseases have complex causes that include interactions with the aged environment.
To address this problem, Gordian’s platform is the first and only to enable pooled in vivo tests at scale in our proprietary “patient avatars”. We are able to deliver and test hundreds of therapeutics in individual animals, and scale efficacy testing to cover every therapeutic target at the beginning of the drug discovery process (more info on our website). We can choose targets that really impact disease biology, to develop and commercialize therapies for the world’s deadliest diseases, and eventually for the processes of aging itself.
The Journey:
Our mission is audacious, and the path will be full of both challenges and excitement. Two things characterize the Gordian experience: 1) We work as a team, with ownership in our own roles and trust in each other. 2) We strive for extraordinary outcomes, and in doing so grow our skills and capability.
Team – Relying on each other begins with transparency. We set clear goals, visibly connecting individuals and teams to our company objectives. This empowers each of us to make autonomous decisions about our work, knowing how they will affect the bigger picture. Our communication happens out in the open. We give and receive feedback from a perspective of helping each other grow, share mistakes, and ask for help.
Extraordinary – Every day, we ask ourselves ‘How could this process/outcome be even better?’. Knowing our overall mission, we do what we think helps us make the most progress, without asking for permission. We don’t shy away from big challenges or unknown territory, but find a way to excel. Our colleagues are amazing, both at what they do and as people. They inspire us to keep up, to not let them down, and be inspiring in return.
Like any cutting-edge research environment, Gordian doesn't believe in a standard 9 to 5 day. We set ambitious project goals and support each other to meet them, while maintaining the balance individuals need to thrive and achieve excellence. Our team is geared towards helping each other out and maintaining a culture of intellectual and social fun. We like getting things done and keep standing meetings to a minimum. This year, in accordance with our unlimited vacation policy, each member took an average of 4.5 weeks of (offline) vacation, not including major holidays. We unwind with weekly team lunches, and support each others’ projects both experimentally and by ‘pre-mortem’ meetings to discuss possible failure modes and experimental design.
If this environment sounds appealing, help us bring it to life. We are at the beginning of a long journey, and want both your ability and your personality along for the ride. Our culture is a source of great pride; it represents both who we are, and who we wish to be.
You can dive deeper here.
About the Role:
As Director of Genomics you will be responsible for the large perturbation datasets generated with Gordian’s mosaic screening platform, allowing us to explore large swaths of disease biology and nominate new therapies.
You will lead a single cell team recruited for their expertise and enthusiasm, ensuring continued operational excellence and efficiency of the team, helping organize and prioritize while balancing execution towards company goals. An important part of your job is to solicit innovative ideas from the team and broader company, determine which efforts and initiatives are critical to achieving our next milestones, and provide structure for achieving these. You’ll partner closely with our CSO to ensure there is a clear understanding on the current state of our platform and opportunities to evolve it as we move further down the development pipeline. Most of your team’s work results in high-dimensional genomics data that requires analysis by our computational team to interpret.
You will use your experience and comprehension, to organize the interface between data generation, data infrastructure and data analysis to communicate seamlessly and operate in lockstep. You will keep an eye on data quality and on oddities that could indicate issues with our screens - the way we generate single cell data is not atypical, but evaluating hundreds of perturbations in heterogeneous biological contexts leads to a lot of surprising outcomes, and we need to decide which mysteries to unravel versus leaving untouched. You’ll enable the whole company to contribute by setting up systems to make screen data more accessible, and ensure that computational outputs and context is fed back to your team to maximize optimization and troubleshooting.
Your experience as a team lead will also be needed to implement improvements and strategy for the platform, while continuing to execute at a high pace. You’ll partner directly with the CSO to implement strategy for evolving our technology to provide answers that help drug development and decisions about clinical strategy. This will transform the value of our platform in improving predictive validity in drug development, and cement the promise of our in vivo approach to the world.
In your first month, you’ll build rapport with the Platform team and understand the work of each member. You will learn how we do in vivo screening and become the team’s go-to for experimental planning and troubleshooting, taking ownership fully off of the CSOs plate. You’ll also take over most of the interfacing efforts the current team have with computational teams.
In two months, you’ll fully own strategic operations between the single cell team and the data teams, and have refined communication and workflows to free up several hours per week across your team. You’ll have absorbed the shapes of data we use and be comfortable exploring it.
By three months, the single cell team is operating smoothly at scale with convenient ways of exploring sequencing/platform data, interfacing with other teams at optimal effectiveness (i.e. computational biology, disease leads). The goals for sequencing and screening are clearly laid out to your team for the next 6 months and everyone is aligned on the path ahead and what needs to happen to get us there. Additionally, you’ll start to brainstorm with our CSO on how we can evolve the platform beyond target discovery and lead 1-2 exploratory projects thinking about how we can grow our platform as we move into target validation and development.
About you:
You have a history of successful execution, both in- and outside of your job description.
You want a chance to do your best work, immerse yourself and excel, alongside people who will inspire you and whom you’ll be excited to spend your days with.
You truly want to play a key role in an early-stage startup screening new targets for intractable diseases of aging: A fast-paced environment full of both uncertainty and new challenges, demanding relentless resourcefulness.
You have managed one or more teams collaborating in a fast-paced environment, and your team members will tell us that you brought out the best in them.
You have worked at the intersection of molecules and computation and speak computational biology as a first or second language. You’re familiar with single cell transcriptomic datasets and their challenges and have a solid analytical competency to help you troubleshoot odd results.
You have experience implementing strategy for strategic technology leadership in biotech (preferably in drug discovery) and setting the direction for a platform or suite of technologies.
You’re a crisp communicator, and are able to seamlessly manage collaboration with cross functional partners and teams.
You are excited to use cutting edge technology to find the best therapeutic targets, and turn those into drugs. You are familiar with pooled screening, barcoding, and the associated pitfalls and challenges, and ideally also with in vivo gene delivery and experimentation.
The Details:
Gordian aims to provide everything you need to thrive. Beyond our community and science, you’ll have enough equity to be a true stakeholder in the company, competitive salary, full health/dental/vision/life insurance, 401k with match, onsite lunch paid for 3 days a week, an onsite gym, whatever vacation you need to be at your peak, remote work flexibility, and access to world-class mentors and advisors to support your professional growth. Our building is in the heart of the biotech capital of South San Francisco.