Lead Technical Recruiter, Formation Bio
$154.5-202k
Plus equity
More information about location
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
$154.5-202k
Plus equity
More information about location
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
- At least 5 years of technical recruiting experience, with at least 3 in-house at a tech startup, with bonus points for life sciences, health technology, or AI-focused companies
- A demonstrated obsession with AI and technology, not just as a nice-to-have but as a lens you bring to how you source, evaluate, and think about talent
- Fluency using AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, or similar) to make recruiting materially faster and more effective, with real examples of how you've done this
- Experience filling roles across levels, from senior engineers to management, with a track record of hiring people who had outsized impact after joining
- Experience as a genuine strategic partner to directors, VPs, and CTOs
- Strong project management skills and a track record of delivering process improvements that measurably raised the bar for hiring quality
- Demonstrated expertise in non-standard, creative sourcing strategies for hard-to-find technical talent
- Strong alignment with how we work: curiosity, high ownership, and a bias toward efficiency and impact
- Ability to build trust quickly with both hiring managers and candidates, and to operate with little direction while staying closely connected to the team
- Someone who does not need to be told that AI is changing recruiting. Someone who is already using it, already thinking about what's next, and already holds themselves to a bar as high as the one we hold candidates to. You should read this job description and feel like it was already how you think
What the job involves
- People are the single most important thing we have to get right to succeed as a company. Every hire we make either accelerates or slows down our mission to get critical medicines to patients faster
- We hold an extremely high bar and run a rigorous process. Every person you bring in should be capable of outsized impact: someone who raises the level of the team around them, ships things that would not have happened without them, and moves the company forward in a way that is disproportionate to a single headcount
- As Lead Tech Recruiter, you will be at the forefront of attracting and securing top technical talent for our data science, engineering, and product teams
- Formation Bio is an AI-native pharma company, and this role is built for someone who thinks that way too
- You will develop and execute recruiting strategies that reflect how AI is changing both the work our teams do and the way we find, evaluate, and win the people who do it
- You will own sourcing, screening, and interviewing for mission-critical roles, act as a strategic thought partner to hiring managers and leadership, and continuously push our recruiting process to be smarter, faster, and more rigorous through the intelligent use of AI tools
- Manage your own requisition load end-to-end, from sourcing through offer, holding every hire to a high bar
- Partner with hiring managers and leadership to discuss headcount, prioritize requisitions, and shape hiring strategy for critical technical roles
- Act as a true business partner to directors, VPs, and CTOs, advising on market trends, salary benchmarks, and best practices in technical and AI talent recruiting
- Bring an AI-native mindset to every part of the role: use AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, and similar) to source candidates, calibrate evaluation, streamline workflows, and continuously raise the quality and speed of our process
- Stay genuinely obsessed with AI and technology, tracking where the field is moving so we know exactly who the best people are and how to reach and win them
- Have a perspective on and interest in developing employer branding strategies that position Formation Bio as the place builders come to solve the hardest problems in drug development
- Act as a thought leader in the technical talent market: identify and participate in events, partnerships, and non-obvious channels to find candidates others miss
- Use data and recruiting metrics to identify where our process can improve, and drive those improvements yourself rather than waiting to be asked
- Organize and participate in events relevant to our target candidate pools to build a pipeline of exceptional technical talent
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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