Executive Director, Automation Operations
Eikon Therapeutics · Millbrae, CA
Eikon Therapeutics is a new biopharmaceutical company employing revolutionary technology at the intersection of chemistry, engineering, computation, and biology to discover novel treatments for life-threatening diseases. Eikon’s discovery platform is built on groundbreaking innovations from its founders (Nobel Prize, 2014), culminating in the creation of microscopes which enable real time, molecular-resolution measurements of protein movement in living cells, thereby unlocking otherwise intractable classes of proteins as drug targets.
Position
As Vice President of Automation Operations, you will lead the organization that builds, operates, and advances Eikon’s integrated discovery platform. You will have responsibility for three teams: Automation Engineering, which develops and deploys the robotic systems that execute Eikon’s high-throughput workflows; Service, which keeps the automated systems running through monitoring, maintenance, and rapid response; and Compound Management, which stewards Eikon’s compound collection and reliably delivers compounds and other research materials to screening and follow-up workflows.
You will sit at the interface between Research and Engineering. Your central mandate is translation: deeply understanding what our scientists are trying to accomplish, and converting those needs into clear, actionable requirements that hardware, software, automation, and systems engineers can build against. Equally important is vision: hearing what scientists ask for today, recognizing the larger need behind the request, and proposing scalable platform solutions that anticipate where the science is going before the scientists have articulated it. A near-term mandate is operationalization: moving validated, scientist-developed assay workflows onto the automated platform as production services, with guaranteed turnaround, equivalent or better data quality, and full sample and data traceability. You will own the phased transition plans that build capability and trust over time, and you will be accountable for demonstrating that the promised efficiency gains are realized.
The platform you will oversee includes integrated systems of liquid handlers (Bravo, Tecan, Hamilton), robotic arms (PF400), automated microscopes (custom in-house imagers, IXMs, etc.), plate readers, incubators, dispensers, Echo acoustic liquid transfer systems, scheduling software, automated compound storage and retrieval systems, and in-house laboratory data systems. These systems operate primarily at Eikon’s Millbrae, California headquarters, with a smaller automation footprint at its New York City site; this role is accountable for automation operations across both. You will be joining a multidisciplinary organization where the integrated platform is central to the science. This position provides the opportunity to shape the strategy of Eikon’s discovery platform, expand the capabilities of our laboratories, and directly influence the speed and quality of drug discovery.
About You
You are equally at home in science and engineering. You have enough scientific depth to engage with biologists and chemists on the substance of their experiments, and enough engineering fluency to specify, challenge, and guide the design of the systems that will run them. You are the person scientists trust to understand what they mean, and the person engineers trust to tell them precisely what to build. You are a platform builder. You have stood up laboratory platforms at biotechnology companies before, and you know the difference between automating a workflow and building a platform: the former solves today’s problem, the latter creates capacity for problems no one has posed yet. You think in terms of architecture, scalability, and operational leverage, and you design systems that outlast their first use case. You are an experienced leader of leaders. You build strong teams, develop managers and senior leaders, set clear priorities across groups with distinct missions, and create an environment of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement. You communicate with equal credibility to bench scientists, engineers, vendors, and executive leadership.
What You’ll Do
- Lead, develop, and grow the Platform Integration organization, comprising the Lab Automation, Service, and Compound Management teams, including their managers and technical leads.
- Define and execute a multi-year platform roadmap aligned with Eikon’s scientific strategy, balancing current operational demands against future capability building.
- Partner closely with Research leadership and bench scientists to understand experimental needs, and translate them into requirements that hardware, software, automation, and systems engineers can execute against.
- Propose forward-looking, scalable platform solutions that go beyond the immediate request, anticipating scientific needs before they are articulated.
- Oversee the design, integration, qualification, deployment, and lifecycle management of automated laboratory systems, from liquid handling and robotics to scheduling and orchestration software.
- Ensure platform reliability through the Service team: monitoring, preventive and predictive maintenance, incident response, escalation, root-cause investigation, and corrective action.
- Own the transition of validated assays from Research into automated production operation through phased plans that first demonstrate equivalence, then scale capacity and scope, without disrupting ongoing science.
- Define and meet service-level agreements for operationalized workflows, including guaranteed data turnaround, assay performance equivalence, and complete data traceability, and serve as the accountable scorekeeper for the efficiency gains automation is expected to deliver.
- Oversee Compound Management through its Senior Director, ensuring accurate, timely, and quality-controlled compound registration, storage, tracking, and delivery across Eikon’s sites to screening and follow-up workflows.
- Establish and monitor operational metrics across the platform, such as system uptime, throughput, turnaround time, failure frequency, and mean time to recovery, and use them to drive investment and improvement decisions.
- Set engineering and operational standards for system architecture, equipment integration, software interfaces, error handling, documentation, and acceptance.
- Partner with software and IT teams to integrate platform systems with scheduling, LIMS, inventory, and analytical data pipelines.
- Manage relationships with equipment manufacturers, integrators, and service providers, including service agreements, escalation paths, and vendor performance.
- Develop budgets, capacity models, resource plans, and risk assessments for platform operations and capital investments.
- Evaluate emerging technologies in automation, imaging, and compound management, and recommend investments that expand scientific capability or operational efficiency.
- Communicate platform strategy, operational performance, technical risks, and resource needs to scientific and executive leadership.
- Foster a culture of safety, scientific rigor, accountability, documentation, and continuous improvement across all three teams.
Qualifications
- Postgraduate degree with 15 years of experience, or Bachelor’s degree with 18 years of experience in in laboratory automation, scientific instrumentation, or platform engineering in the life sciences.
- 5+ years leading multidisciplinary technical teams and managing managers, including director-level leaders.
- A demonstrated track record of standing up laboratory platforms at biotechnology, pharmaceutical, or life-science companies, from initial concept through scaled production operation.
- Deep working knowledge of both experimental science and engineering practice, with a demonstrated ability to translate scientific needs into engineering requirements and to represent engineering constrain