Executive Director, Automation Operations

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 de