Job Description

Director, Scientific Collaborations and Applications

Posted on

January 6, 2026

Pleasanton

CA

We are seeking an experienced and scientifically driven Director of Strategic Collaborations to join our team. This role blends deep genomics expertise with customer-facing scientific leadership. The strategic role will generate impactful datasets and publications, strengthen scientific advocacy for our platform, and expand the demonstrated applications of our technology through collaborations and field engagement. This position will manage projects and experimental work in Pleasanton or at customer sites as well as travel to customer locations, collaborations, conferences, and KOL visits.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Applications Discovery & Market Expansion:

• Develop and execute strategy for scientific publications, datasets, and KOL network to promote adoption of technology
• Explore and validate new application areas across NGS, single-cell, spatial, microbial, forensic, and translational genomics.
• Track emerging trends and rapidly assess feasibility and impact to identify opportunities where the platform provides unique advantages.
• Build and actively manage collaborations with focused group of KOLs in high-impact research domains.

Scientific Leadership & External Presence:

• Represent the company at conferences, workshops, customer visits, and seminars.
• Deliver high-quality scientific talks and poster presentations.
• Act as a scientific ambassador to external labs, core facilities, and institutions.
• Strengthen customer trust and advocacy through consistent scientific engagement.
• Build and maintain deep scientific relationships with customers and key accounts.

Education and communication

• Identify high-potential customer datasets suitable for publication or case studies.
• Develop application notes, benchmarking datasets, protocols, and internal scientific resources.
• Support customers in preparing manuscripts, posters, abstracts, and presentations.
• Support the broader scientific narrative around customer success and application innovation.
• Partner with marketing for event planning, customer speakers, collateral and messaging

Additional responsibilities:

• As a member of the product team, assist in prioritizing feature requests by bringing voice of customer
• Partner with sales to win strategic accounts, especially multi-site facilities and labs running validated production workflows through seminars, datasets, and sites visits
• Support R&D teams with application-driven method development and validation
• Personally drive hands-on experimental design, data generation, and analysis for key application datasets
• Own timelines and deliverables for collaborative projects, including internal coordination and external follow-through
• Operate effectively in an environment with evolving tools, incomplete workflows, and limited historical data

Qualifications:

• PhD in Molecular Biology, Genomics, Bioengineering, or related field
• Postdoctoral experience strongly preferred
• Experience identifying, building, or working with KOL networks.
• Experience establishing and managing external collaborations to generate datasets and publications
• Experience spanning multiple genomic applications (WGS, RNA-seq, single-cell, spatial, microbial, etc.).
• Strong scientific writing and communication skills.
• Proficiency with NGS data analysis and common bioinformatics tools.
• Comfortable working cross-functionally with R&D, Product, Sales, and Marketing teams.
• Comfortable working in early-stage, resource-constrained environments, with a bias toward action and iteration

Bonus Skills:

• Experience with complex customer accounts like pharmaceuticals or large commercial diagnostic labs
• Experience in single-cell or spatial transcriptomics.
• Background in forensics, clinical, or translational genomics.
• Track record of scientific publications, posters, or collaborations.
• Mix of in-office work for analysis, writing, project management, and field-based scientific engagement.
• Requires travel to customer sites, conferences, and collaborative visits (~15-25%).
• Fast-paced environment with cross-functional collaboration.
• High level of scientific rigor, communication, and customer interaction required.

Why This Role Matters:

This role directly influences customer outcomes, scientific credibility, and the advancement of new applications for our platform. You will help shape the company commercial strategy, scientific reputation of the company, strengthen community advocacy, and accelerate discovery in multiple genomics fields.

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