Founding Lab Operations Associate Onsite (Cambridge, MA)

About the Deliverome Project

Deliverome Bio is a nonprofit startup building a first‑of‑its‑kind open atlas of surface protein abundance and internalization. We’re hiring a founding team to generate the data that could expand what targeted therapies can reach.

You will own the lab that everything else depends on. This is a founding operations role in a new BSL-2 laboratory in Cambridge: you will take responsibility for equipment, procurement, inventory, safety, and the systems that keep a small team of scientists running at full speed, and you will build most of those systems yourself rather than inheriting them.

It is also a bench role. You will contribute directly to experiments, support cell culture and cryobanking, and help maintain key equipment. This balance will shift over time to a purely lab manager role and is ideal for current wet lab scientists looking for a unique opportunity to grow into operational leadership.

Like all of our founding hires, you will have a direct line to the co‑founders and real authority over how the lab works. The workflows you design will be documented and released alongside our protocols, and the operational decisions you make in the first year — how inventory is tracked, how equipment is maintained, how samples are handled — will still be visible in how this organization runs at ten times the size.

Lab operations and infrastructure

• Own day‑to‑day lab function: reagent and consumable availability, waste streams, gas and liquid nitrogen supply, autoclave and water systems, shared bench and cold‑storage organization

• Build and maintain the operational systems the lab runs on — inventory, ordering, receiving, equipment logs, sample and cell line tracking, freezer maps — and improve them continuously rather than tolerating friction

• Set and enforce the standards that make shared resources reliable: labeling conventions, stock and aliquot management, expiration and lot tracking, cleanup and reset expectations

• Onboard new scientists to the lab: training, access, safety, and the practical knowledge of where things are and how they work

Procurement, vendors, and budget

• Run procurement end to end: quotes, purchase orders, capital equipment purchases, receiving and reconciliation, backorder and substitution management

• Manage vendor and distributor relationships, negotiate pricing and standing orders, and applying nonprofit tax exemption correctly

• Track consumable burn rates and set reorder points that avoid both stockouts and freezer archaeology

• Support budget tracking and grant‑aware purchasing in partnership with the co‑founders and bookkeeping

Equipment ownership

• Own the instrument fleet operationally: installation and commissioning coordination, preventive maintenance schedules, service contracts, calibration, field service visits, and downtime escalation

• Support and help maintain core platform instruments — cell sorter, live‑cell imaging, centrifuges, biosafety cabinets, incubators, cryogenic storage, balances

• Build on initial monitoring and alarm coverage systems for freezers, incubators, and cryostorage, and the response plan for when something fails at 2am

• Evaluate and specify new equipment as the platform expands, including used and auction purchases where they make sense

Safety and compliance

• Own lab safety in practice: chemical hygiene, biosafety practice and training, PPE, spill response, hazardous and biological waste manifests, oxygen monitoring where cryogens are in use

• Support institutional biosafety and municipal registration requirements, permit renewals, and inspection readiness

• Manage shipping and receipt of biological materials, including dry ice and regulated shipments, and support material transfer agreement logistics

• Keep documentation audit‑ready before an audit is scheduled

Experimental contribution

• Execute mammalian cell culture, cryobanking, and routine cell line maintenance and lentivirus preps, including authentication and mycoplasma testing

• Support occasional platform experiments hands‑on

• Prepare and QC common reagents, media, and buffers to a consistent standard

• Generate clean records for everything you run, and flag what didn’t work as…