Associate Director, IT

Spun out of Stanford and MIT, Stellaromics is an innovative biotech startup founded in 2022 and located in Boston, MA. Our pioneering proprietary technology helps researchers and clinicians create comprehensive cellular maps enhancing our understanding of various diseases, with our flagship product STARmap and upcoming Pyxa™ suite of products. We have a passionate management team and committed investors who believe in our patented technology and overall mission to profoundly advance biomedical research and accelerate the discovery of life-saving treatments.

Stellaromics is seeking an Associate Director, Information Technology to own and build out IT at the company. This is a hands‑on, build‑it role: you will personally administer systems, manage our storage and compute footprint, run our security program, and hold our vendors accountable, while simultaneously establishing the policies, procedures, and controls a company at our stage needs in order to grow, pass customer and investor diligence, and protect its intellectual property.

Today IT at Stellaromics is a mix of cloud services, lab‑attached instrumentation, on‑premise and cloud storage, and outsourced support. Your first job is to bring order to it. Your second is to turn it into a durable, documented, secure operation with a roadmap and a budget behind it. You will not have a large team at the outset, so you must be comfortable doing the work yourself;

you will, however, be expected to lead across R&D, Manufacturing, Commercial, Finance, HR, and Legal to get policy adopted.

This role is onsite at our Boston headquarters. Regular onsite presence is required to support lab instrumentation, network and server infrastructure, and hands‑on user and equipment needs.

• Own the storage estate end to end. Administer and scale on‑premise and cloud storage supporting multi‑terabyte imaging and sequencing datasets, including file/object storage, NAS/SAN, high‑throughput instrument capture, and archive tiers.
• Design and enforce data lifecycle management. Build tiering, retention, and archival policies that keep hot data fast and cold data cheap, in partnership with R&D and Computational Biology on what actually needs to stay online.
• Guarantee recoverability. Own backup, replication, and disaster recovery: define RPO/RTO by data class, implement immutable/offline copies, and test restores on a documented schedule rather than assuming they work.
• Support research compute. Partner with Computational Biology on compute and pipeline infrastructure (HPC and/or cloud), including capacity planning, data transfer performance, and instrument‑to‑storage‑to‑analysis data flow.
• Manage networking and core infrastructure. LAN/WLAN, switching, firewalls, VPN and remote access, server room/data closet, UPS, and lab network segmentation.
• Forecast and control storage cost. Model growth in TB and dollars, report it to Finance, and drive optimization; this is one of the fastest‑growing line items in the company.

• Run the security program. Own day‑to‑day security operations: endpoint protection/EDR, patch and vulnerability management, email security, logging and alerting, and incident response.
• Harden identity and access. Administer SSO/MFA and conditional access (e.g., Okta, Microsoft Entra , Google Workspace), enforce least privilege, and implement joiner/mover/leaver access reviews and privileged access controls.
• Protect intellectual property. Implement practical data protection, classification, and egress controls appropriate to a company whose core asset is its scientific and engineering IP.
• Adopt a recognized framework. Map our controls to NIST CSF, CIS Controls, ISO 27001, or SOC 2 as appropriate, close…