Associate Director, IT & Business Enablement

About us:

Our purpose at Dispatch is to help create a world where all cancer patients can be cured. We’re humbled by the opportunity to work together as a team on some of the most pressing medical challenges of our time.

To achieve our purpose, we are dedicated to engineering a universal treatment across solid tumors. We’re committed to the development of novel therapies, leveraging first-in-class technologies in viral vectors, universal targets, and novel cytokine biology. Our therapeutic approach has the potential to enable us to treat significant numbers of cancer patients and make a real and lasting impact on the world.

Our company was founded on pioneering work carried out in the laboratories of Dr. Carl June (University of Pennsylvania), Dr. Kole Roybal (University of California, San Francisco), Dr. Christopher Garcia (Stanford University) and Dr. Andy Minn (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center).

At our company, you would become one of our early team members— not only playing a role in meeting our ambitious mission but also building our thriving culture. We are determined to deliver with urgency to discover new solutions and we always stay dedicated to scientific rigor; we have an ownership mindset because each and every one of us is integral to our success.

Collaboration is core for us because we believe that by bringing people together with diverse perspectives, we make a stronger whole. And, we show we care about our work and each other by sharing feedback - ultimately in service of our vision to empower people to continue forward with their lives – cancer free.

The role:

The Associate Director, IT & Business Enablement will serve as the strategic and operational IT leader for Dispatch Bio — a high-impact, highly visible role at a company on the cusp of clinical-stage milestones. This is not a traditional IT manager role in that we are looking for a leader who brings equal parts IT operational knowledge and strategic vision: someone who can hold our managed service provider (MSP) accountable to SLAs and quality standards, while simultaneously shaping a forward-looking applications and data strategy that scales with the company.

In this role, you will partner with scientific, clinical, and operational leaders to build a cost-effective, compliant, and future-ready technology foundation — one that empowers our scientists with self-service access to computational resources, positions us well for regulatory scrutiny, and ensures AI is embedded thoughtfully into how we work. Travel up to 20% of the time.

Key responsibilities:

IT Operations

• Serve as the primary internal point of contact for our IT MSP to ensure service quality, accountability, prioritization and continuous improvement.
• Manage relationships with IT vendors and third-party service providers, conducting regular business reviews and driving continuous improvement
• Develop and manage short- and long-term IT budgets, optimizing spend across MSP services, SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure, and security tools
• Ensure consistent IT service delivery across our Philadelphia and San Francisco offices

Applications Strategy & Business Process Enablement

• Own and maintain a company-wide applications roadmap, balancing near-term needs with a scalable, cost-effective architecture that can grow with the company through clinical development and beyond
• Partner with functional leaders to gather business requirements and identify the right technology solutions
• Lead the evaluation, selection, and deployment of enterprise applications, ensuring thoughtful change management and user adoption

Data Governance & Security

• Full accountability for architecting and sustaining the organization’s cybersecurity framework to ensure total operational resilience
• Design and govern data architecture, storage, access controls, and lifecycle management appropriate for a clinical-stage biotech operating under GxP requirements
• Partner with research leads to understand evolving computational needs and proactively plan capacity and tooling
• Develop and enforce IT policies and procedures that reflect both regulatory requirements and practical operational realities
• Ensure systems are…