Senior Technical/Scientific Program Manager

Deep Origin

12h•Hybrid

About The Position

Deep Origin is seeking an exceptional Senior Technical/Scientific Program Manager to lead the execution of a highly complex, multidisciplinary R&D program. This role involves operating as the execution leader for a large scientific and engineering organization, coordinating internal teams and external collaborators to achieve aggressive technical milestones. The position requires working directly with executive leadership, principal investigators, engineering leaders, and scientific collaborators to translate an ambitious vision into measurable outcomes. Success demands exceptional organizational ability, strong technical intuition, and the capacity to build alignment across diverse organizations. This role is a hybrid of a Technical Program Manager, Chief of Staff, and Program Director, ideal for individuals who have led organizations where hundreds of engineers, scientists, partners, and stakeholders moved in lockstep toward a common objective. The ideal candidate understands both software development and scientific research, appreciating the nuances of experimental outcomes, protocol development, laboratory operations, and inter-laboratory reproducibility. They will facilitate productive discussions among AI researchers, software architects, computational biologists, laboratory scientists, principal investigators, CROs, and government stakeholders, ensuring the program progresses towards ambitious technical milestones. This person will create structure, anticipate risks, and keep numerous parallel workstreams aligned, earning trust through execution and driving large organizations toward ambitious goals without unnecessary bureaucracy.

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.

Nice To Haves

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

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.