Head of External Drug Discovery Operations, London

Overview

In this role you will lead and scale the external drug discovery and preclinical operations, coordinating wet-lab work with enterprise data systems. You will design a modern CRO infrastructure tailored for an AI-first drug design platform, ensuring high-throughput, high-fidelity data generation and streamlined workflows. You’ll shape external sourcing strategies to speed up the pipeline while maintaining quality and cost efficiency. You’ll build and mentor a cross-functional team and partner with global sites to align internal and external work. This is a mission-driven opportunity to accelerate transformative medicines through integrated data and CRO excellence.

Pay / Benefits

• hybrid working model

Responsibilities

• Oversee all external drug discovery and preclinical operations, ensuring throughput, data quality, and turnaround times feed internal computational pipelines
• Embed AI-first data architecture with standardized schemas, rich metadata, and machine-readable formats for external deliverables
• Establish vendor selection criteria, governance tiers, KPIs, and strong CRO partnerships while quickly resolving bottlenecks
• Coordinate with London, Boston, and Lausanne leaders to forecast resourcing and translate milestones into external work packages
• Evaluate novel CRO platforms and capabilities with Business Development and Discovery Leadership
• Manage external discovery budget, MSAs/SOWs, and invoice processes in collaboration with Procurement and Legal
• Recruit, lead, and develop a high-performing CRO-focused team and foster cross-functional collaboration

Key requirements

• Ph.D. or Master’s degree in Chemistry, Biology, Pharmacology, or related life sciences
• Significant industry leadership in biopharma R&D, external research, or externalized discovery programs
• Broad technical knowledge across medicinal/synthetic chemistry, in vitro/in vivo pharmacology, and ADMET workflows
• Experience establishing structured data collection with external vendors, automated QC, data curation, and machine-readable data transfers
• Proven ability to deploy productivity tools and automated workflows for external research operations
• Commercial and financial acumen with multi-million discovery budgets and vendor agreements (MSAs/SOWs)
• Track record of leading teams in a matrix structure and aligning cross-functional stakeholders
• Familiarity with small molecules and complex or emerging modalities
• Nice to have: AI-first mindset and data structuring for ML workflows; exposure to biologics workflows

• strategic thinking
• strong cross-functional collaboration
• leadership and mentoring
• AI-first data architecture
• data-standardization and metadata capture
• machine-readable data transfers

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