Head of Translational Science

Absentia Labs • Boston, MA

17h • $140,000 - $150,000

About The Position

At Absentia Labs, we are building an AI-native IND-enabling safety platform for drug development. Our mission is to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations make better safety decisions earlier in development through human-relevant, AI-driven predictive toxicology. This role exists to bridge the gap between technology, regulatory strategy, and real-world drug development, ensuring that Absentia's platform solves meaningful problems, integrates with existing workflows, earns the trust of scientific stakeholders, and delivers measurable value to customers. This is not a traditional research role; we are seeking a hands-on leader capable of connecting science, product, regulatory strategy, and customer needs to help define the adoption of AI-native safety assessment across the global drug development ecosystem. The Head of Translational Science will own scientific-market fit at Absentia, ensuring our platform addresses the highest-value problems in drug development, generates trusted evidence, and evolves to support adoption across pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and regulatory organizations.

Requirements

• PhD, PharmD, MD, DVM, or equivalent scientific training preferred.
• Experience in toxicology, translational medicine, pharmacology, drug development, or nonclinical safety.
• Experience within pharmaceutical, biotechnology, CRO, or translational research environments.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management capabilities.
• Ability to operate in ambiguity and build new categories.

Nice To Haves

• Experience supporting IND-enabling programs, translational medicine initiatives, nonclinical safety assessment, or regulatory science activities.
• Experience interacting with pharmaceutical decision-makers and cross-functional development teams.
• Track record of scientific publications, conference presentations, and external stakeholder engagement.

Responsibilities

• Define how Absentia’s platform maps to real-world decision-making across discovery, candidate selection, IND-enabling development, translational medicine, and clinical risk assessment.
• Identify the highest-value workflows, use cases, and decision points for platform adoption.
• Partner with leadership to shape product strategy and roadmap priorities.
• Develop and maintain relationships with toxicology, nonclinical safety, translational medicine, and pharmacology leaders across pharma, biotech, CROs, and regulatory organizations.
• Lead customer discovery efforts to identify unmet needs, adoption barriers, workflow requirements, and evidence expectations.
• Translate customer insights into platform requirements, validation priorities, and product roadmap recommendations.
• Understand how safety decisions are made within pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations.
• Design workflows that make platform outputs actionable, interpretable, and trustworthy.
• Ensure product development aligns with how customers actually operate.
• Help define validation strategies, publication priorities, scientific collaborations, and evidence-generation initiatives.
• Support the development of scientific narratives that facilitate adoption.
• Help determine what evidence customers require before integrating the platform into decision-making processes.
• Develop and manage relationships with key opinion leaders (KOLs), scientific advisors, academic collaborators, and industry experts.
• Identify opportunities for strategic scientific collaborations, validation studies, and external partnerships.
• Represent Absentia at scientific conferences, workshops, advisory meetings, and industry forums.
• Partner closely with the CTO and the engineering team.
• Collaborate with Regulatory Strategy leadership.
• Support Business Development and Strategic Partnerships efforts.
• Translate customer requirements into technical and scientific priorities.
• Lead the development and execution of Absentia's scientific publication strategy.
• Identify and prioritize high-impact publication opportunities, including validation studies, benchmark analyses, case studies, methodological advancements, and regulatory science initiatives.
• Serve as a primary author and contributor for peer-reviewed manuscripts, conference abstracts, scientific posters, white papers, technical reports, and thought leadership content.
• Collaborate with the CTO, Regulatory Strategy leadership, and scientific teams to translate technical and regulatory progress into scientifically rigorous publications and external communications.
• Coordinate with academic collaborators, key opinion leaders (KOLs), industry partners, and co-authors to develop, review, and submit scientific publications.
• Establish and manage a publication roadmap that supports platform validation, regulatory engagement, scientific credibility, and commercial adoption.
• Support preparation of scientific materials for major conferences, workshops, symposia, and industry events.
• Ensure scientific communications accurately reflect platform capabilities, validation results, regulatory positioning, and intended use cases.
• Help position Absentia as a recognized thought leader in AI-native safety assessment, computational toxicology, predictive safety sciences, and drug development innovation.
• Track publication impact, scientific engagement, and citation opportunities to continuously strengthen Absentia's scientific reputation and market presence.
• Develop publication strategies that support scientific credibility, regulatory engagement, customer adoption, fundraising, and category creation.

Benefits

• A front-row seat to the future of drug development and regulatory science.
• Collaboration with world-class scientists, engineers, and regulatory experts.
• Flexible work structure, deep autonomy, and a high-trust culture.
• The opportunity to help define a new market category.
• Competitive base salary and performance-based bonus tied to execution quality, operational impact, and growth support.
• Base Salary: $140,000 – $150,000
• Bonus: $30K annual target bonus
• Equity: 0.8 - 1%

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree