Director of People, Formation Bio
$177.5-232k
Offers equity
3-5 days a week in office
Powering hyper-efficient, tech-driven drug development
Posted today
Powering hyper-efficient, tech-driven drug development
101-200 employees
Posted today
$177.5-232k
Offers 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
- 8+ years of experience in people operations, people business partnering, total rewards, and/or HR leadership roles
- Proven track record leveraging AI and automation to improve people operations. You have concrete results, not just enthusiasm, and a clear vision for what an AI-native People Team can become
- Strong operational background. You've owned people systems, benefits, compliance, and built scalable people operations infrastructure that enables the business
- Experience designing and scaling people programs while balancing quality, consistency, and operational efficiency. You’ve successfully led change by building alignment and bringing leaders and employees along through it
- Ability to make independent, complex decisions. You exercise strong judgment, evaluate tradeoffs with a company-wide perspective, and anticipate long-term implications
- Strong ownership mentality and high accountability. You take full responsibility for outcomes, proactively identify opportunities, and drive work to completion
- People management experience. You've developed and elevated individuals and teams, set a high bar for performance, and care deeply about career development
- Strong cross-functional partnership skills. You build trusted relationships with leaders, internal teams, and external vendors
- Comfortable working in fast-paced, high-growth environments. You thrive in ambiguity and can seamlessly shift between strategic thinking and hands-on execution
- Compensation expertise is a plus. You've designed compensation frameworks, conducted market analyses, and thought strategically about equity and total rewards
- Experience in biotech, pharma, or other technical or regulated industries is a plus but not required
What the job involves
- Formation Bio is looking for a Director, People to drive operational excellence, lead strategic people programs, and partner with leaders to solve complex organizational challenges
- Reporting to the SVP, Head of People, you'll have broad ownership across the People Team, translating business priorities into scalable programs, processes, and decisions that help the company grow. This is a high-impact role for someone who is comfortable thinking strategically, diving into the details, and operating with a high degree of autonomy
- Our People Team operates as business-first partners, setting a high bar for talent, culture, and execution while embracing AI and technology to rethink how People Teams create value. We're looking for someone who shares that mindset, is energized by challenging conventional approaches, and wants to help build an AI-native People Team that supports Formation's mission and culture
- This role is responsible for three areas that are critical to the success of our People Team and the broader business. The majority of your time will be spent in the first two pillars, where you'll drive strategy, execution, and continuous improvement across our People Team
- People Operations Excellence
- Drive AI-native operations across the People Team, identifying opportunities to leverage technology and fundamentally redesign workflows while maintaining the human elements of our work
- Ensure operational excellence and compliance and continuously evolve our people processes as the business scales
- Lead complex, cross-functional processes and partner with internal stakeholders including Legal, Finance, Tech Ops, and Quality Assurance to deliver business outcomes
- Serve as the escalation point for complex people operations, benefits, and compensation matters
- Manage external vendor relationships and consultant partnerships while continuously evaluating opportunities to improve quality, cost, and effectiveness
- Program Design & Strategic Execution
- Elevate and own our performance, promotion, and compensation review programs to ensure quality, consistency, and scalability as we grow
- Own our compensation strategy and execution for Formation's unique business model, including framework design, market positioning, and equity programs
- Lead benefits strategy, vendor selection, and plan design, ensuring our total rewards package is competitive and supports our culture and business needs
- Anticipate future people program needs based on business priorities and organizational growth
- People Business Partnership
- Serve as a strategic People partner for designated leaders and functions
- Develop a deep understanding of the business and build trusted relationships with leaders to anticipate business needs, identify organizational risks, and develop solutions
- Coach managers through complex people situations while balancing employee experience, business outcomes, and long-term organizational health
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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