Program Lead, Therapeutic Discovery

About the Role

You’ll work closely with the founders and a small team from MIT, Harvard Medical School, Baker Lab, and Radical Numerics.

For the right person, this will likely be one of the steepest learning curves of their career. This is a place where your role can change every few months. If you demonstrate strong judgment, you will quickly gain increased responsibility—taking on new workflows, modalities, programs, or core tasks to own. We provide context, trust, and the resources needed to move fast.

What You’ll Do

• Lead new therapeutic programs from concept through early validation. These may include programs in contraception, menstrual suppression, stress resilience, cognition, exercise mimetics, recovery, sleep, or other areas where biology could meaningfully expand human health and capability.

• Bring forward ambitious, scientifically grounded program ideas aimed at meaningfully expanding human health or capability.

• Turn scientific ideas into executable programs: define the target, mechanism, modality, assay strategy, biomarkers, translational path, budget, timeline, and kill criteria.

• Select the right modality for each project, which may include RNA, small molecules, peptides, polymers, biologics-adjacent approaches, or other fast-iteration platforms.

• Not only develop proposals but also execute: target selection, literature review, experimental design, molecule design or sourcing, assay development, in vitro testing, in vivo testing, data review, and next-round program decisions in close collaboration with our scientific team.

• For promising programs, help build the team and infrastructure around them: hire scientists, identify advisors, select partners, source animal models, procure instrumentation, and manage execution.

• Lead programs while remaining close to the science and data. For strong programs, we can commit significant early validation capital—up to $1M for initial experiments, and substantially more if data support continued investment.

Who You Are

• Ideally, you have created or helped create a drug candidate that has advanced into clinical trials or reached the market.

• You have previously originated and advanced your own scientific programs, not just contributed to others’ roadmaps. You can provide examples where you identified a promising mechanism or opportunity, designed the experimental path, drove execution, and produced concrete outcomes—meaningful data, decisions, publications, patents, products, funding, or similar.

• You are motivated by high-impact biological problems—including sleep, cognition, reproductive health, disease resistance, recovery, aging, and the physiological constraints on human performance and health.

• You have strong scientific judgment and are able to critically evaluate papers, mechanisms, phenotypes, or therapeutic ideas to determine their potential as real programs, including defining targets, modalities, assay plans, biomarkers, model systems, translational paths, and decision points.

• You are high-agency, precise, skeptical, and execution-oriented. You move quickly while maintaining scientific rigor.

Pay & Benefits

• $180,000–$340,000 annual salary, plus at least $50,000–$200,000 worth of equity options

• Compensation depends on qualifications, skills, competencies, and experience

• Visa sponsorship provided if necessary

• Wellness budget: $500+ per month for training, supplements, personal trainers, and everything you need to become your best self

• Comprehensive healthcare coverage with a range of medical options

Application Process

• Initial application

• First phone screen

• Second phone screen, approximately 30 minutes

• In-person work trial in San Francisco

Please note, this process may be subject to change depending on the role and other circumstances.

Apply Today

Applying takes just 5 minutes. We encourage you to apply as soon as possible. We’re evaluating candidates on a rolling basis and want to make an offer quickly.