Associate Director, Lab Technologies

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Cambridge, MA, US

Salary Range: $ To $ Annually

Aera Therapeutics was founded by a world-class team of scientists, investors, and company builders with a shared vision to unlock the potential of genetic medicines across a broad range of modalities and therapeutic areas. We strive for excellence and an industry-leading position in our chosen delivery platforms, while aggressively hunting for opportunities where enabling delivery technologies can unlock applications of high, unmet medical need.

Leveraging deep expertise in the space, Aera has a leading LNP platform that enables today’s applications, while investing in and developing a potentially disruptive antibody oligonucleotide conjugate platform to enable tomorrow’s applications.

The Associate Director of Lab Technologies will lead the software, infrastructure, and computational backbone of the research organization. You will own the systems and tools that capture, structure, and act on scientific data, and translates the needs of research teams into secure, scalable, and increasingly AI-enabled technical solutions. You will be reporting into our Chief Scientific Officer and be expected to work onsite in our Cambridge office at least 4 days per week.

• Develop software that runs on lab instruments to capture data and transform it into structured, usable form
• Build and maintain cloud architecture and security hygiene, access control to those systems
• Own the data architecture for scientific data, with schemas and models that keep it structured, traceable, and reusable
• Develop and maintain Benchling as the core lab informatics system, evolving it with new features as the science grows and changes
• Oversee and organize bioinformatics development across the groupincluding support for NGS analysis, oligonucleotide design, and off-target analysis
• Enable computational design and discovery, leveraging machine learning and AI methods
• Evaluate, negotiate, and manage software vendors and contracts
• Prepare budget requests and justifications for leadership, and manage purchasing
• Manage Claude usage and implementation across the organization, in partnership with IT to ensure use is safe and defensible
• Build tooling on top of Claude to extend AI for Aera's specific use cases
• Lead, and mentor a small Lab Technologies team across software engineering, cloud infrastructure, bioinformatics, and lab informatics
• Partner with research, regulatory, quality, IT, and finance to translate scientific and business needs into technical solutions
• Communicate technical work clearly to non-technical and differently-technical stakeholders
• Support regulatory and quality needs as the organization matures toward the clinic

• Master’s degree in a technical discipline such as engineering, computer science, data science, automation, or a related scientific field with 8-10 years of years of relevant industry experience or PhD with 6-8 years of relevant industry experience
• Experience with Python and AWS and the ability to engineer software infrastructure and analysis pipelines.
• Expertise in genomics and NGS, ideally RNA-seq and single cell sequencing
• Significant experience working with Benchling
• Prior hands-on experience working with oligonucleotide and/or mRNA therapeutics
• Commitment to our Core Values:
  Respect, Integrity, Excellence, Impact

The approximate salary range for this role is $180,000 - $200,000.

Our salary ranges are determined by job scope, level, and location. The range displayed on this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum…