Director/Senior Director of Product, Formation Bio
Applied Data Science
$245-307k
+ Equity
3-5 days a week in office
Powering hyper-efficient, tech-driven drug development
Be an early applicant
Powering hyper-efficient, tech-driven drug development
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$245-307k
+ Equity
3-5 days a week in office
101-200 employees
Company mission
To bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.
Role
Who you are
- 7+ years of experience in data science, applied science, or a technical product role with progressively broader scope, including at least one role where you were accountable for turning analytical work into a deployed capability
- Life sciences experience: you've worked in biotech, pharma, or a related industry, and understand the drug development lifecycle well enough to have informed opinions about where a computational method holds up and where it doesn't
- Strategic thinker: you decide what's worth scaling based on business and scientific impact, not novelty or ease of building. You're as comfortable saying a finding shouldn't scale as you are greenlighting one that should
- AI/ML fluency: you can evaluate whether a method remains valid at exhaustive scale, make build-vs-buy calls on tooling, and push for AI/ML approaches where they create real leverage
- Technical fluency: you can engage deeply with data scientists and engineers on method, architecture, and trade-offs. You know when a statistical approach breaks down outside the single case it was built for
- Cross-functional influence: you've directed or coordinated technical teams, including engineers and data scientists, and you earn trust through technical credibility
- Business fluency: you can discuss diligence findings, asset valuation, and scientific risk with senior leaders
- Comfortable with ambiguity and autonomy: this is a new function at Formation, and the scope of what gets scaled and how will be defined in part by you
- Mission-driven: you care about getting medicines to patients faster. That's what this company exists to do, and it matters to you
What the job involves
- This role sits on Formation's Asset Acquisition & Diligence (AAD) team. In the course of evaluating and completing diligence on individual drug assets, our Data Science team runs sophisticated one-off analyses (e.g. a novel algorithm run against a specific gene or indication, a causal model built for a specific therapeutic hypothesis). Much of that work directly shapes a specific deal decision in the moment
- This role exists to take these and scale them into strategies and tools that can provide an organization level advantage
- You will own the judgment call of which asset-evaluation and diligence analyses have generalization potential across the AAD team's sourcing and evaluation work, and what form that generalization should take: sometimes a landscape analysis (the same method run not on one gene, but on every gene, surfaced as a standing analysis that informs sourcing rather than a product), sometimes a fully engineered, scaled tool built in partnership with Data Science and Engineering
- You are the connective tissue between one-off diligence work and durable diligence and sourcing capability
- This is a hybrid science and product role on AAD. You will set technical and product direction for a working team of data scientists and engineers who continue to report to their functional leads
- You'll need enough technical depth to judge when a diligence method holds up at scale, and enough product judgment to know when “scale” means a single exhaustive analysis rather than a maintained tool - all in service of how Formation sources and evaluates drug assets
- Own the strategy for scaling Formation's data science work for asset acquisition and diligence. Decide which one-off analyses have generalization potential, in what form (landscape analysis vs. scaled tool), and how to measure success
- Direct a working team spanning Data Science and Engineering day to day. Set the roadmap and sequence work based on business impact, coordinating with functional leads on resourcing. Execute against that roadmap with clear lines to business impact
- Work directly with Data Science and Business Development as strategic partners. Translate scientific findings into a scaled roadmap, not by taking feature requests, but by understanding the science well enough to see generalization and alpha opportunities
- Guide the technical approach on methods being scaled, including statistical validity at exhaustive scale, pipeline design, and dataset evaluation. You need enough technical judgment to know when an approach is sound and when to push back
- Work with scientific and technical teams to identify any new opportunities for AI to impact Formation’s asset acquisition and diligence process and be able to pitch those to stakeholders with a clear explanation of resourcing and business impact
Our take
Clinical drug trials are lengthy and expensive, delaying the supply of vital new drugs to patients and costing lives. For Formation Bio, this is an efficiency issue - one which it hopes to solve with its end-to-end automation solution.
According to the company, its approach has teams running medical trials twice as fast and at half the cost. This success has pushed Formation to expand beyond supporting trials into developing assets itself. In 2025, it reached a major milestone by licensing its first drug in a deal worth up to hundreds of millions. Alongside this, the company has also added an early immunology program to its pipeline, signalling a broader push into in-house development.
Now a Unicorn, with partners including Pfizer, Sanofi, Novartis and 23andMe, Formation Bio is steadily embedding itself within the Big Pharma ecosystem. How far it can go remains an open question, but the prospect of cheaper drugs and faster innovation is becoming harder for the industry to ignore.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
30% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jun 2024
$372m
SERIES D
Sep 2021
$156m
SERIES C
Total funding: $530.3m
Company benefits
- Flexible Time Off: We have a flexible PTO policy and we encourage our team members to take the time that they need to recharge
- Parental Leave: All parents receive 12 weeks of fully paid bonding leave to welcome a newborn, adopted, or fostered child, and birthing parents are eligible for an additional 6-8 weeks of paid leave
- Comprehensive Benefits: All full time employees have access to health, vision, and dental insurance. Additionally, we provide pre-tax commuter benefits, access to a 401k plan, short and long-term disability and life insurance.
- Education & Career Development Resources: Formation Bio offers a plethora of professional development resources to employees, including a yearly L&D stipend, internal mobility opportunities, in depth trainings, leadership coaching, and more.
- Community: Our teams collaborate closely to achieve our mission, supporting each other across functions and priorities. We build connection through team-building events, quarterly company gatherings, a biennial company-wide retreat, and various Employee Resource Groups.
Company values
- Think in first principles: We rigorously interrogate all possible paths to understand how we can do things differently and faster. We challenge assumptions, ask why, and solve problems from the ground up
- Be a scientist: We are curious and we continuously learn. We steelman, not strawman in debates. We listen, rapidly iterate, and make the best decisions with the evidence we have
- Deliver care: We lead with empathy. We value different perspectives, collaborate across teams, and support one another. We give and receive direct, actionable and timely feedback to hold ourselves and others to a high bar
- Champion the mission: We keep the mission as our north star and deliver impact for patients. We hold ourselves accountable for our wins and failures and keep moving forward
Company HQ
Midtown South, New York, NY
Articles
Leadership
Benjamine Liu
(Co-Founder & CEO)Worked as a computational biologist at various Neurology departments, following a D.Phil in computational Biology and Psychiatry at Oxford. They are also an Advisor at Harvard Business School.
Linhao Zhang
(Co-Founder)Linhao is also the Founder of Foundation 649. Previously, they were a Product Engineer at Oscar Insurance, a Software Engineer at Salesforce, and co-founder of Day 7 Photography.
Dan Neil
(CTO)Prior to joining Formation Bio in 2025, Dan was the Chief Data Officer at Tessera Therapeutics. Before that, they spent nearly 7 years at BenevolentAI in various roles, including SVP of AI & NY Site Lead and CTO.
Dale Klasko
(Senior Vice President, People)Dale built her career as a campus recruiting leader and strategic people business partner at growth-stage companies in the adtech & finservices industries.
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