Head Of Platform

---

Job description

Are you ready for the challenge of taking on our CSO's duties at the center of Gordian's unique in vivo screening platform? You will be managing an interdisciplinary team of experts, to carry out intensive screening efforts while simultaneously improving the capabilities and efficiency of our core technology.

The Destination:

Gordian Biotechnology is a therapeutics company focused on diseases of aging, the major unmet medical need of our generation. Age-related diseases have complex causes that include interactions with the aged environment, and traditional ex vivo screening methods have failed to produce effective treatments. To address this problem, Gordian's platform delivers and tests hundreds of therapeutics in individual animals. We thus scale in vivo efficacy testing to cover every therapeutic target at the very beginning of the drug discovery process (more info on our website). This lets us 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 2.5 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:

AND 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: A fast-paced environment full of both uncertainty and new challenges, demanding relentless resourcefulness. You have experience leading time-sensitive projects, in collaboration with other specialists. You have deep expertise, and broad curiosity. You are excited to use cutting-edge technology to find the best therapeutic targets, and turn those into drugs. Your mission as head of platform is to orchestrate the application of Gordian's platform, and maintain Gordian's position as the leader of in vivo pooled screening. The four current members of the platform team have been recruited for their expertise and enthusiasm for developing amazing science, and are excited to work with you. We constantly push to improve the company's core screening capabilities, typically with multiple overlapping projects demanding a high degree of coordination and logistical planning. You'll stay on top of multiple projects at once, and while the rest of your team executes on one you'll be looking ahead to eliminate scientific and logistical risks for the next project. When we're pushing our hardest, you'll occasionally lead from the bench, doing anything that is required for the team's success. Your attention will alternate between project management, and innovating on what our platform can do. As lead platform technologist, you will be reading and thinking about how to make our screening platform cheaper, faster, and more informative. You'll evaluate new tools and approaches, and bring the most promising ideas to your team to incorporate into our workflow. You'll combine the mindsets of scientist and engineer, focusing equally on cost-effective reliability and pioneering biology. Our in vivo screens can be used for a wide range of discovery, optimization, and troubleshooting experiments. There will be more ideas to pursue than our bandwidth allows, and an important part of your job is to identify which initiatives are critical to achieving our next milestones by identifying the best way to prioritize and sequence. At the same time, you'll reinforce and embody the existing culture of striving for excellence, in full alignment and collaboration. You'll work with each member of the team and use your experience to help them achieve everything they're capable of. Your team should stay excited about the progress they're making together, every day and every week. In your first two months, you will have enmeshed yourself in the team and created a bulletproof plan for screening ~500 therapeutic candidates in a large animal model. This will require earning the trust of the existing platform team, and understanding the work of each member as well as the tradecraft we've developed for in vivo screening. This first screen will be for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and you'll work with our NASH biologist to consider the impact of disease biology on your plans. You'll need to predict every potential fail-mode of this project, and design experiments to de-risk each one. Next, by six months you will have guided the implementation of one or more new methods to improve our cost per interpretable result by 20% or more, and hired two new members of the platform team that meet or surpass Gordian's high bar. Strong candidates will be familiar with pooled screening, barcoding, and transcriptomic analyses, and ideally also with in vivo gene delivery and experimentation. You combine a mindset of process optimization and reliability with demonstrated ability to invent/adopt brand new tools in biotechnology. You'll need very strong project management skills, to keep track of multiple projects with overlapping timelines and multiple sources of risk. You've got experience managing a collaborative team, and your team members will tell us that you brought out the best in them. You're ambitious, conscientious, and a crisp communicator.

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, 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 labs are in the Dogpatch, near UCSF Mission Bay.