Senior Technical/Scientific Program Manager

About Deep Origin

Led by Michael Antonov, the co-founder of Oculus, Deep Origin’s mission is to reinvent the way scientists work and bring life science innovations to life. We’re building the tools to accelerate drug development and extend human healthspan by decades. To get there, we are building an operating system for science, enabling scientists to be more productive and to bring tomorrow's ideas to life quickly and at a reasonable cost.

About the Project

In partnership with the federal government, Deep Origin is leading the development of the most ambitious AI-driven platform designed to reinvent how drug discovery and biomedical research are conducted. The system brings together artificial intelligence, mechanistic disease models, interoperable laboratory protocols, and a distributed network of research labs to create a continuous cycle of hypothesis generation, experimentation, and learning. The project spans multiple engineering and scientific disciplines and requires coordinating numerous internal teams and external partners to deliver a groundbreaking research ecosystem.

About the Role

We are seeking an exceptional Senior Technical/Scientific Program Manager to lead execution of a highly complex, multidisciplinary R&D program. This is not a traditional software project management role. You will operate as the execution leader for a large scientific and engineering organization, coordinating internal teams and external collaborators while ensuring the program delivers against aggressive technical milestones.

You will work directly with executive leadership, principal investigators, engineering leaders, and scientific collaborators to translate an ambitious vision into measurable outcomes. Success in this role requires exceptional organizational ability, strong technical intuition, and the ability to build alignment across organizations with different priorities.

Responsibilities:

• Own execution of a large, multi-year strategic R&D program.
• Coordinate work across AI, software engineering, computational biology, laboratory automation, cloud infrastructure, product, and scientific teams.
• Manage collaboration across universities, CROs, research institutes, government stakeholders, and commercial partners.
• Build and maintain integrated program plans, critical paths, dependencies, milestones, and risk registers.
• Lead weekly cross-functional program reviews and executive status meetings.
• Track technical deliverables across dozens of parallel workstreams and proactively remove execution bottlenecks.
• Drive communication between engineering, science, operations, and external collaborators.
• Ensure projects remain on schedule, within scope, and aligned with strategic objectives.
• Identify risks early, develop mitigation strategies, and escalate issues appropriately.
• Establish scalable program management processes, governance, reporting, and documentation as the organization grows.
• Coordinate with and report to top leadership about the program status and work with them on commercialization activities.

Requirements

• 10+ years leading large, cross-functional technical programs.
• Hands-on experience working in life sciences, biotechnology, pharmaceutical R&D, or academic biomedical research.
• Strong understanding of experimental biology, laboratory workflows, protocol development, and the challenges of scientific reproducibility.
• Experience with wet labs, CROs, cloud labs, or lab automation systems
• Demonstrated experience managing programs involving multiple organizations and diverse technical disciplines, including both software engineers and experimental scientists.
• Experience coordinating software engineering teams together with research, scientific, or hardware organizations.
• Outstanding organizational, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle, Agile methodologies, and systems engineering.
• Ability to understand complex technical discussions and facilitate decision-making without being the technical expert.
• Proven ability to manage ambiguity and drive execution in fast-moving environments.
• Background in managing projects or grants for the US federal government and interfacing with government officials.
• Strong, proactive, clear communication style.

Highly Preferred Experience

Candidates with experience leading execution for one or more of the following will be given strong preference:

• DARPA, ARPA-H, NIH, NASA, NSF, or other large government-funded R&D programs
• Large technology companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, NVIDIA, etc.) leading highly cross-functional initiatives
• Multi-institution scientific collaborations involving academia, industry, and government
• AI, machine learning, computational biology, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, or scientific software platforms
• Programs involving external subcontractors, consortiums, standards bodies, or open-source collaborations
• Global organizations with distributed engineering and scientific teams.

What Success Looks Like

The ideal candidate understands bothhow software is built and how science is conducted. They appreciate that experiments do not always produce deterministic outcomes, recognize the practical realities of protocol development and laboratory operations, and understand why reproducibility across independent laboratories is difficult. They can facilitate productive discussions between AI researchers, software architects, computational biologists, laboratory scientists, principal investigators, CROs, and government stakeholders while keeping the program moving toward ambitious technical milestones.

The ideal candidate creates structure where none exists. They naturally organize highly complex programs, anticipate execution risks months before they become problems, and keep dozens of parallel workstreams aligned.

This person earns trust through execution. They know when to challenge assumptions, when to escalate issues, and how to keep large organizations moving toward ambitious goals without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

Ideal Background

We’re looking for someone who has successfully delivered programs of similar complexity—not necessarily in the same domain. Candidates who have led execution for DARPA or ARPA-H programs, coordinated large-scale scientific collaborations, or managed mission-critical cross-functional initiatives at leading technology companies are especially well suited.

This role is best described as a hybrid of a Technical Program Manager, Chief of Staff, and Program Director. If you’ve led organizations where hundreds of engineers, scientists, partners, and stakeholders had to move in lockstep toward a common objective, we’d like to hear from you.

Benefits

What we offer

• Opportunity to shape the future of health, longevity, and our ability to simulate life.
• Competitive compensation package with meaningful equity.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Annual team gatherings and company events.
• Free lunch, snacks, beverages, and onsite gym access (for in-office employees).