Head of Platform

Department: Science

Location: San Francisco, CA

Compensation: $255K – $284K

Employment Type: FullTime

The Mission

Drug discovery has a translation problem: more than 95% of drugs that succeed in animal models fail in humans. We're building the alternative: human-first drug discovery, powered by organoids and AI, running on real human biology from the very first experiment.

Our platform is 87% concordant with clinical patient data - a vast improvement over the 3% translational success rate of animals. We’ve demonstrated the ability to model immunotoxicology, immunogen stimulation, and two autoimmune diseases with more on the way. Numerous pharma partners including 3 Fortune 500 companies are already using the platform. We've raised ~$30M from AIX Ventures, Marc Benioff, Jeff Dean, and Y Combinator. With the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 and the FDA's March 2026 validation framework, the regulatory tailwinds only continue to get stronger.

The opportunity ahead of the company is generational: build the first scaled engine for generating real human biological data, and use it to fundamentally change how medicines are discovered.

What you'll do

• Design, prototype, and build fully autonomous workcells across the entire organoid lifecycle — seeding, culture maintenance, perturbation, harvest, and assay execution. You should have deep, credible experience in designing and deploying similar systems.

• Own all mechanical engineering, robotics, and computer vision required to move the platform from discretely automated to fully end-to-end. You should have the academic credentials and work experience to think through and own the entire development roadmap of these workcells.

• Evolve our internal orchestration software. We have an in-house tool that simulates automated experiments and runs workcells today. You'll grow it into a system that designs and executes experiments in an equipment-agnostic way, across every workcell we build. You’ll collaborate with the broader software team to later connect the orchestration software to the rest of the data substrate.

• Find the next automation frontier. Identify, ideate, prototype, and build new workcells for every part of the wet lab still touching human hands.

• Build and lead the team. You’ll manage a cross-functional team of biologists, hardware engineers, and software engineers - all working as one cohesive unit.

• Partner closely with the Head of AI/ML so every workcell is purpose-built for the data it produces.

Day one, week one, month one

• Day one. Walk the lab. Dive head-first into our technologies, including our human immune organoid. Get hands on the hardware. Sit with the biologists keeping the platform running today and find out where the real friction lives.

• Week one. Audit the full automation stack end-to-end: workcells, orchestration software, data pipeline. Spend real time inside our in-house simulation tool. Identify the single highest-leverage gap between where we are and the "data factory" scale.

• Month one. Deliver a roadmap to the co-founders: workcell architecture, software evolution plan, hiring plan, and sequencing. Start building: first prototype, first hire, first refactor, whichever moves the platform fastest. Set the cadence and operating model for the team.

Who you are

• A builder. You've taken complex hardware-software systems from blank page to operational, ideally in lab automation, robotics, or biotech.

• Deep technical range. Real depth in at least two of: mechanical engineering, robotics, computer vision, lab automation — and you can hold your own with experts in the rest.

• A cross-functional leader. You've run teams where biologists (or other technical experts), hardware folks, and software folks have to ship together, and you know how to keep them aligned without flattening their disciplines.

• End-to-end owner. Design it, prototype it, ship it, scale it. The hard parts of the build are where you do your best work.

• A tinkerer and an inventor. You'd rather build the new thing than buy the off-the-shelf one. "No one's done this before" is the part that excites you, and you’re motivated by the recognition of your future innovations.

• Energized by autonomy. You thrive when handed a hard, ambiguous problem and trusted to solve it your way.

• Leader & operator. You can be in the lab with a wrench in the morning and running a hiring loop in the afternoon.

Bonus points

• Hands-on experience with organoid culture, microfluidics, or high-content imaging

• Built or contributed to lab orchestration software (SiLA, OPC UA, PyLabRobot, etc.)

• Scaled a platform from one workcell to many — and learned where the cracks show up

Parallel Bio is building human-first drug discovery: 10x faster, 1000x cheaper, 0 animals killed.

Parallel Bio is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful workplace. We encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, or sexual orientation.