Director of Business Development, Formation Bio
Search & Evaluation
$235-307k
Offeres equity
3+ days a week in office
End-to-end medical trial solutions
Open for applications
End-to-end medical trial solutions
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$235-307k
Offeres equity
3+ days a week in office
101-200 employees
Company mission
To bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate will have a strong scientific background paired with business acumen, ideally with experience in search and evaluation, venture, or business development
- This role requires someone who can identify assets that would benefit from Formation Bio's tech-enabled development capabilities and build relationships across the biotech and pharmaceutical industries
- PhD in biological science or MD with laboratory research experience strongly preferred
- An outgoing, motivated, and creative approach to business development
- Curiosity and insight around the role of AI in drug development, clinical trials, and business development
Desirable
- 3-7 years of post-degree experience, with a combination of scientific and business expertise
- Prior experience of biotech or pharmaceutical business development (search & evaluation), venture capital investing, or life sciences consulting is highly preferable
- Strong network within the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, with the ability to leverage contacts for sourcing early-stage assets; Enthusiastic about networking, relationship building, and externally-facing activities
What the job involves
- The Director of Business Development, Strategic Sourcing, will play a key role in identifying, evaluating, and managing early-stage assets and opportunities for Formation Bio's business development pipeline
- This role will involve guiding potential opportunities from asset identification through to transaction closing, working closely with the business development team to identify outreach areas and drive deal flow within designated outreach regions
- Leading deal-by-deal opportunity/asset teams from asset identification to transaction close
- Collaborating with the BD team to identify target areas for outreach, focusing on strategic alignment with Formation Bio's goals
- Owning and managing one or more designated business development outreach areas (e.g., big pharma, biotech companies, designated therapeutics areas)
- Maximizing activity and ensuring high-quality deal flow in assigned outreach areas, developing a steady stream of opportunities
- Conducting initial triage of opportunities, evaluating potential deals before engaging the broader diligence team to ensure strategic fit
- Working cross-functionally with R&D, tech platform, and commercial teams to ensure smooth handoffs and successful transitions in the diligence process
- This role offers the opportunity to help build the pharma company of the future, combining strategic asset acquisition with tech-enabled development capabilities to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently
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 as we trust our team members to take the time they need to recharge.
- Parental Leave: We believe your personal life enriches your professional one. We offer 16 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents so you can start or grow your family.
- 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. Some examples include fireside chats with industry experts, conference passes, certification courses, internal mobility opportunities, in depth manager training, leadership coaching program, and more.
- Strategic Hiring Hubs: Formation Bio teams are hybrid and based in four key hubs: New York City, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Our bright and collaborative NYC headquarters is conveniently located near major transit hubs and stocked with drinks, coffee, snacks, and a weekly lunch.
- 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 company-wide retreat every two years, and 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.
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