Director, Early Alliance Management

This is a dual-track program management position inside a growing early-stage development group. Roughly half the job is timeline ownership: sitting with scientific and operational leads across the discovery-through-early-clinical continuum and turning their input into a working plan — schedule, dependencies, staffing, and the decisions that need to get made along the way. The other half is running point on a joint oversight committee shared with an external partner organization, so that both sides walk into every session already aligned on what needs to happen.

Day to day, that means becoming fluent enough in how each function actually operates — research, translational and safety science, chemistry and DMPK, manufacturing, clinical development and operations, regulatory, biostatistics — to map how their work interlocks, spot the critical path, and explain in plain terms what breaks when a timeline, budget, or headcount assumption changes. On the partnership side, it means keeping the shared committee's agenda, records, and open items organized enough that neither side has to think about logistics between meetings. Across both tracks, the job is converting conversation into a written decision and then making sure that decision actually gets executed — and helping shape the templates and workflows the broader function runs on as it scales.

What You’ll Do

• Build and own integrated program plans — schedules, milestones, staffing, dependencies — for each program you're assigned, working directly with functional leads and bench scientists to stress-test how long the work will actually take.
• Translate those functional inputs into a program-wide critical path, and keep each function's individual plan aligned to it as things evolve.
• Call out, in practical terms, what changes when scope, timing, or staffing shifts — what's affected, what's at risk, and the recommended path forward — for both program and functional leadership.
• Run team meetings that end in actual decisions rather than open threads, and keep one running decision log so there's a single source of truth for what was decided and why.
• Manage the external governance committee's operating cadence end to end: build agendas jointly with your counterpart at the partner organization, pull in topics from members and subteam leads, prioritize by urgency, distribute materials, and keep a shared archive that separates the live cycle from past records.
• Turn meeting minutes around quickly and tie every recorded decision back to its originating meeting; convert action items — internal or joint — into owned, dated commitments, and follow up to confirm they actually closed out.
• Track risks and issues to resolution, escalating and building contingency plans with functional and partner-side leads as needed; keep committee and subteam rosters current, flag staffing gaps early, and support onboarding of new members.
• Produce the status reports, dashboards, and briefing materials that give leadership real-time visibility into program and collaboration health, and support resourcing/forecasting conversations with Finance and functional leaders.
• Help build out the playbook — tools, templates, and standard practices — for this program management function as headcount and program count grow, and be a connective presence across the PM team, functional stakeholders, and external partners.

What We’re Looking For

Must-haves

• Master's degree in a scientific, engineering, or related technical field (further advanced degrees welcome).
• 7+ years leading projects or programs in biotech, pharma, or a CRO, with experience spanning discovery through translational and early clinical stages.
• A demonstrated ability to turn scientific/technical input into a workable, integrated project plan and dependency map.
• Comfort running cross-functional meetings and pushing groups toward documented, actionable decisions rather than open-ended discussion.
• Sound judgment on the ripple effects of program changes, and the communication skill to lay out trade-offs clearly for leadership.
• Strong written and spoken communication across audiences — from bench scientists to senior executives.
• A track record of getting things done through influence and relationship-building rather than positional authority.
• The organizational range to run several complex programs in parallel.