Senior Director or Vice President of Product, Formation Bio
$270-467k
+ Equity
3+ days a week in office
Powering hyper-efficient, tech-driven drug development
Open for applications
Powering hyper-efficient, tech-driven drug development
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$270-467k
+ 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
- 10+ years of experience in tech delivery with progressively broader scope, including at least one role where you led product or technology strategy and were held accountable for business outcomes
- Life sciences experience: You've built products in biotech, pharma, or a related industry. You understand the drug development lifecycle well enough to have informed opinions about where technology does and doesn't help. You've worked in an environment shaped by regulatory constraints and scientific uncertainty
- Strategic product thinker: You define product direction based on business outcomes, not feature velocity. You've owned a product area where success was measured in terms the business cared about - time saved, decisions improved, cost reduced - not just user engagement or ship rate
- AI fluency: You can evaluate AI/ML approaches, make build-vs-buy decisions on AI capabilities, and push your team to use AI where it creates real leverage. You've deployed or led the deployment of LLM-based or agentic systems in a professional context
- Technical fluency: You can engage deeply with engineers and data scientists on approach, architecture, and trade-offs. You can evaluate whether an ML model is solving the right problem, whether a data pipeline is reliable enough, and whether an engineering approach will scale
- Cross-functional leadership: You've led teams that included engineers, data scientists, and product managers. You know how to hire, develop, and hold people to high standards
- Business fluency: You can discuss clinical trial design, asset valuation, regulatory strategy, and competitive dynamics with senior leaders without retreating to technical jargon. You've been in rooms where the conversation was about business decisions, not product decisions, and you contributed
- Comfortable with ambiguity and autonomy: You are highly adaptable and curious. You've worked in early-stage companies, on transformation efforts or new initiatives where the scope was unclear and the playbook didn't exist. That energizes you rather than stalls 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
- Formation Bio is hiring Product Leads to own major problem domains across our drug development platform - for example, how we evaluate and acquire drug assets, how we design and run clinical trials, or how we build regulatory submissions
- You will report to the CTO
- This is a product leadership role, but not a traditional one
- You won't be writing specs for engineers to build
- You'll own a business domain: set the strategy, define what to build, lead a cross-functional team through delivery, and be measured on whether the work actually changes outcomes for the drug programs and business functions you serve
- Your team will include engineers, data scientists, and product managers (ranging from senior ICs to managers)
- You will be embedded with our clinical, translational, regulatory, and business development leaders - understanding their problems deeply enough to identify where technology can make a material difference
- That means learning what makes a drug asset attractive, what drives a trial design decision, what the FDA cares about, and where the real time and cost sinks are
- You should be able to drive value in a clinical review meeting in the same way you drive value in a sprint planning session
- We are not building consumer software
- We are building tools, models, and systems that make specific drug development decisions faster and better - prediction models that assess drug candidate viability, AI-driven workflows that compress diligence timelines, and platforms that let non-engineers build their own analytical tools
- You will own a slice of that work and be accountable for its impact
- Own the product strategy for a defined problem domain (e.g., drug candidate evaluation, clinical trial execution, regulatory intelligence). Define what to build, what to deprioritize, and how to measure success
- Drive adoption of AI across your domain. We use LLMs, agentic workflows, and autonomous systems extensively. You should be pushing what's possible, not waiting for the technology teams to propose it
- Design systems that domain experts across the company can build on directly. Non-engineers are already creating their own technology - your solutions should accelerate that, not bottleneck it
- Lead a cross-functional team spanning engineering, data science, and product. Set the roadmap and make resourcing trade-offs based on business impact
- Work directly with our core functional teams as a strategic tech partner. Translate their problems into technology solutions - not by taking feature requests, but by understanding the domain well enough to see opportunities they may not
- Guide the data science and engineering approach within your domain, including real-world evidence analysis, prediction pipelines, clinical strategies, and dataset evaluation. You need enough technical judgment to know when an approach is sound and when to push back
- Maintain awareness of regulatory constraints. You don't need to be a regulatory expert, but you need to build products that work within GxP requirements and clinical data governance standards
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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