Head of Operations Olden Labs, PBC South San Francisco, CA Job Details Full-time $100,486.20 - $120,832.84 a year 4 hours ago Benefits Relocation assistance Qualifications Dashboard development Manufacturing management Sourcing Process design Manufacturing standard operating procedures Manufacturing facility experience Hiring Recruiting Standard operating procedures (SOPs) Standard operating procedures drafting Full Job Description Who this is for. You have taken a physical-product operation through a real scale-up before, as the #2 or as the #1 somewhere smaller. You were the person who wrote the procedures after the first ugly launch. You have double-sourced a consumable after a vendor slip cost you a quarter. You have watched a build rate triple. Where you are now, you feel constrained to apply your full potential and you are ready to own manufacturing end to end, from the first SOP to the staffed floor. You're ready to be the person who built the operation that took a company from a small floor to a massive one. Why now. In June, 13 people shipped ~2000 items in 5 weeks without automation. It was heroic, and your job is to replace heroics with systems. We have been sold out three to four months forward for the last 18 months, so the system has to be built while the line keeps running. The seat. You report to the CEO. You own SF manufacturing and fulfillment end to end: the production floor, the technicians on it, inventory, packaging, shipping, and the vendors that feed all of it. You own the interface with our Indonesia manufacturing site (devices, parts flow, handoffs, quality at the boundary), but you do not run that site, it has its own lead. Software engineering builds the tooling you spec. You work directly with the three founders: a Harvard PhD who reversed aging in the lab, an applied-AI PhD and math olympian, and a hardware engineer who built much of 10x Genomics' automation layer. Your mission. Set up and run manufacturing and distribution in South San Francisco as a machine: high quality tech shipped at a multiple of today's volume, with clear metrics throughout and no founder in the loop. What you will do. Write the v1 process yourself, stand at the station and run it, find where it breaks, fix the process rather than the instance, then hand it to a technician and move to the next one. Double-source or in-source every critical consumable. Put build, ship, defect, and COGS numbers on one screen the whole company can see. Hire and train the SF ops team once the processes are stable enough to hand over. What you will achieve. 90 days: every critical-path consumable double-sourced or in-house. Written SOPs at every station, tested by you at the station. 6 months: live build/ship/defect/COGS dashboard with inventory visibility. A launch crunch run without the founder in the war room. 9 months: a staffed SF ops team, a multiple of today's throughput with defect rate flat or down, and COGS per unit trending down. Why Olden. 90% of therapies fail in human trials, and their fate is decided in animal studies still run by hand with 1960s methods. Olden turns an ordinary cage into an automated platform that captures 20 health biomarkers continuously. Every unit you ship is a lab that can run a study it could not run before. Full mission at the bottom of this page. Required Operations or manufacturing for physical products, through at least one significant scale-up. You have built SOPs and processes from scratch. Real supply-chain and multi-vendor sourcing experience, including at least one vendor failure you engineered around. Hands-on now, team-builder later. Bonus Lab, medical-device, or contract-manufacturing background. Experience working with an overseas manufacturing site. Technical enough to build your own dashboards and automation. Quality-systems experience (ISO-like). This is not for you if You need an existing playbook to run. You want to manage rather than build with your own hands right now. Your instinct when something breaks is to fix it rather than to make it unbreakable. You prefer a 9-to-5. You need long-term job stability. Intensity. Most weeks are normal. Crunches happen 3-4x per year with all-hands on deck until the last unit ships. Right now, hands-on is the job. Comp. Meaningful equity + $100-$120k cash. Higher if you're an exceptional match or seniority justifies. Location. South San Francisco, 94080. You need to be based in the Bay Area and on the floor regularly, although the machine you build should run when you are not standing next to it. Olden's Mission Today, 90.6% of therapies fail in human clinical trials. As a result, one drug costs an average of $2.3B and takes 12 years to get to market. Animal studies is where the fate of therapies is decided. Once a drug has entered humans, very little can be changed. But today, almost all animal studies are done by hand, with methods that date back to 1960s. This makes studies expensive, low throughput and irreproducible. Only about 30% of animal studies replicate even in the same animal species. Because of this, improving animal testing is one of the highest leverage activities anywhere in biomedical research. Olden is building Animal Research 2.0. Our tech turns an ordinary cage into an automated data collection platform that captures 20 biomarkers of health continuously, at a scale and reproducibility no other existing method can match. This means lower cost studies and more reproducible studies, as well as less human bias. If we succeed at bringing this to the world at large, the impact could be enormous. Reducing clinical trial failure rate even by 2% would mean 10 more drugs approved per year - more than the output of the two world's largest pharma companies combined. In short, the outcome of your work at Olden could equal the output of a full Big Pharma department. About us Olden is run by a Harvard PhD genetic engineer who reversed aging in the lab; an applied AI PhD who represented their country at International Math Olympiads, and a Harvard MSc hardware engineer who built much of 10X Genomics automation layer. We are a team of high intensity & high agency people. Our customers double down, refer others and their papers go viral (100k+ views). Large programs in governments and industry use our tech to set unified metrics across fields. Last quarter we launched a total of 16 new or updated product lines while simultaneously delivering a record increase in units shipped to customers. Over the past 18 months, we have been sold out on average by 3-4 months into the future, despite rapidly scaling manufacturing. How we work Hypercompetent people who share the mission and have real decision autonomy. We run on light but functional SOPs and high standards, and we mentor so the system scales. We have three sites across multiple time zones and customers in 5 continents. Expect some odd hours. We move in sprints. Most weeks are normal; crunches happen and everyone is on the bench when they do. No busywork. If it doesn't serve the product or the customer, we don't build it. What we value Maximum impact, personal growth, agency and speed. Expect to be challenged and stretched, and feel like your work matters. We don't value comfort. We don't have fancy offices. We set salaries to prevent financial distractions, not to enable luxurious personal lives. Apply if you are motivated by personal growth, by challenging work and by the goal of building a foundational & generational company that scales your personal positive impact more than any other entity in biotech. Olden Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.

Pay:

$100,486.20 - $120,832.84 per year

Benefits:

Relocation assistance Application Question(s): Earliest start date? What's the hardest thing you've done? How many manufacturing or fulfillment SOPs have you written from scratch? (rough estimate ok)

Location:

South San Francisco, CA 94080 (Required) Ability to

Relocate:

South San Francisco, CA 94080: Relocate before starting work (Preferred)

Work Location:

In person