Senior Manager, Projects and Programs - Research

About Xaira Therapeutics

Xaira is an innovative biotech startup focused on leveraging AI to transform drug discovery and development. The company is leading the development of generative AI models to design protein and antibody therapeutics, enabling the creation of medicines against historically hard-to-drug molecular targets. It is also developing foundation models for biology and disease to enable better target elucidation and patient stratification. Collectively, these technologies aim to continually enable the identification of novel therapies and to improve success in drug development.

Xaira is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and London.

We are seeking a Project Manager to support Xaira’s high-priority Agentic AI Initiatives, including X-Cell, X-Design, and related programs. This role is well suited for a candidate with a strong scientific and software background who has experience with cross-functional project management in research settings, where ML/AI system and biologics R&D intersect. The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience with ML model training and evaluation, agentic AI systems (tool use, orchestration, human in the loop review), software development, and biologics R&D, with the ability to manage timelines, track deliverables, and partner closely with scientific and technical leads to keep fast-moving programs on track.

This position emphasizes scientific and technical depth, coordination across ML, engineering, and scientific teams, and milestone tracking in an environment where playbooks are being defined and evolving rapidly. It is a strong fit for someone with a technical background at the interface of ML, software, and biology who is comfortable managing cross-functional projects and collections of project driving towards program objectives and milestones.

• Project Planning and Execution
  • Support day-to-day planning and coordination of platform research programs, ensuring clear communication of next steps, expected deadlines, and needs to stakeholders.
  • Build and maintain project timelines that capture critical milestones, dependencies, and deliverables.
  • Partner with scientific leads and functional stakeholders to align on scope, priorities, and progress.
• Milestone Management & Decision Support
  • Collaborate with scientific teams to define key project milestones, decisional experiments and translate into actionable, resource-information timelines.
  • Help compile project data, timelines, risks, and trade-offs to support informed decision-making.
  • Coordinate and facilitate planning and documentation of decisive experiments, and update project plans based on results and next steps.
• Cross-Functional Project Coordination
  • Facilitate cross-functional collaboration across research to ensure effective communication and documentation of decisions, alignment of priorities and timelines.
  • Schedule and run cross-functional meetings, ensuring clear agendas, effective documentation, and follow-up on action items.
  • Monitor interdependencies across functions and proactively identify, flag and resolve conflicts across work streams.
• Operational Support & Project Monitoring
  • Track project status, risks, and mitigation strategies; provide updates to internal stakeholders.
  • Coordinate with functional leads to understand resource needs and potential impacts to timelines.
  • Contribute to scenario planning and contingency thinking for critical path activities.
  • Identify operational challenges and recommend improvements to enhance efficiency and coordination.
• Resource Coordination & Timeline Scenarios
  • Work closely with functional and team leads to understand resourcing needs, identify gaps and timeline impacts.
  • Develop scenario plans for critical path development decisions to support contingency and investment planning to address potential delays, bottlenecks, or shifts in scope.

• Advanced degree (MS, PhD, or equivalent) in life sciences, bioinformatics, computational biology or a related field strongly preferred.
• Minimum of 6+ years of industry experience, including hands-on biologics research with demonstrated project or timeline management…