[Hiring] Drug Discovery Resource Outsourcing Manager @Absci

Role Description

This role sits at the center of the bottleneck in our discovery organization, where you will:

• Receive incoming research requests from program teams.
• Decide with program teams what should be executed in-house versus outsourced.
• Triaging technical requests, requiring scientific fluency in early-stage drug discovery.
• Be the primary point of contact with our Chinese CRO partners, requiring fluency in Mandarin.

Key Responsibilities

• Intake and triage:
  • Serve as the single intake point for internal research requests (protein expression and purification, binding and functional assays, developability and biophysical characterization, structural work, in vivo studies, analytical method development, and similar early R&D activities).
  • Assess each request against internal technical expertise, instrument and platform availability, and current team capacity, and recommend an internal, external, or hybrid execution path.
  • Escalate conflicts in priority to program and functional leadership facilitating the identification of a solution.
• CRO sourcing and qualification:
  • Identify, evaluate, and shortlist CROs in China against technical capability, capacity, quality systems, data integrity practices, IP posture, and cost.
  • Build and maintain a qualified vendor list mapped to service categories, so future requests can be routed quickly.
• Contracting and compliance groundwork:
  • Get the paperwork ahead of the science. Drive execution of CDAs/NDAs and Master Service Agreements with prospective and active CROs before SOWs are needed, so program timelines are never gated by contracting.
  • Draft, negotiate, and shepherd SOWs, work orders, change orders, and purchase requisitions through Legal, Finance, and Procurement.
• Execution oversight and communication:
  • Act as day-to-day liaison between internal scientists and CRO project teams: kickoff meetings, protocol alignment, progress reviews, and data delivery.
  • Conduct meetings, negotiations, and written correspondence with CRO partners in Mandarin; translate and reconcile technical requirements across languages so nothing is lost between the protocol and the bench.
  • Report on cycle time, on-time delivery, spent versus budget, and data quality; use those metrics to refine which work goes where.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in a life sciences discipline (biochemistry, molecular biology, biotechnology, immunology, protein science, pharmacology, or related); PhD welcome.
• 5+ years in biotech or pharma with direct exposure to early discovery R&D.
• Demonstrated experience outsourcing research work to CROs, including practical familiarity with the contracting sequence: NDA/CDA → MSA → SOW → change order.
• Professional fluency in Mandarin Chinese (spoken and written) and English.
• Strong project management skills and comfort holding a queue of competing priorities without losing detail.
• Excellent judgment about confidentiality and IP; handling unpublished data and pre-filing material daily.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience specifically with China-based CROs and an existing network among them.
• Background in biologics or antibody discovery or in small-molecule discovery.
• Willingness to travel nationally and internationally 2–4 times per year for site visits and partner reviews.

What Success Looks Like in the First Year

• A published, agreed triage process that program teams actually use, with visible queue status and decision rationale.
• A qualified China CRO panel with NDAs and MSAs already executed across the service categories we use most.
• Measurable reduction in time from request submission to work start, and in internal scientist time spent on vendor administration.
• Zero contracting or compliance surprises on placed work.

Legal Authorization

Legal authorization to work in the United States is required.