Isomorphic Labs on cord

Isomorphic Labs

Head of External Drug Discovery Operations

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Isomorphic Labs?
Machine Learning and AI · BioTech · Pharmaceuticals
We are reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach.
Posted
2 days ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
14 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Head of Operations
Experience level: Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: Building Teams, Business Analysis, Commercial recruiting, Data Protection
Other skills considered: Data Security, Project Management, Stakeholder Management, Technical Direction

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

The Head of External Drug Discovery Operations is a highly impactful role to drive and optimise how we utilise external partners to accelerate our pipeline delivery. You will lead all externalised drug discovery and preclinical laboratory activities, bridging wet-lab execution and enterprise data strategy. You will design, establish, and scale a modern CRO infrastructure tailored for an AI-first drug design platform, ensuring external workflows yield structured metadata, standardised assays, and automated ingestion pipelines across diverse therapeutic modalities. In partnership with DDMR leadership, you will shape long-term external sourcing strategies to maximise operational agility, experimental quality, and cycle time reduction. You will lead a dedicated team of CRO Scientific Leads, CRO Operations Managers, and Compound Managers, fostering a culture of technical and operational excellence, and cross-functional collaboration with our project teams.


What you will do

  • Lead CRO operational strategy and execution: Oversee all external drug discovery and preclinical operations, driving accountability for experimental throughput, data quality control (QC), and end-to-end turnaround times to feed internal computational pipelines.
  • Embed AI-first data architecture: Partner with Data Engineering and Informatics to mandate that external partner deliverables adhere to strict data-generation-by-design standards (standardised schemas, rich metadata capture, machine-readable formats, and direct pipeline integration).
  • Strategic partner governance: Establish vendor selection criteria, governance tiers, and rigorous KPIs. Cultivate collaborative, high-trust relationships with key CROs while enforcing deliverables and rapidly resolving scientific or operational bottlenecks.
  • Internal stakeholder alignment: Partner across our London, Boston and Lausanne sites with the Heads of Biology, Chemistry, DPC and DMPK/Safety to forecast resourcing demands, balance internal/external capacity, and translate project milestones into actionable external work packages.
  • Evaluate novel platforms and technologies: In collaboration with Business Development and Discovery Leadership, scout, assess, and onboard emerging CRO capabilities and specialised experimental platforms.
  • Commercial and budget stewardship: Collaborate with Procurement, Legal, and Finance to manage the external discovery budget, negotiate MSAs/rate cards, and streamline SOW generation and invoice reconciliation.
  • Build and mentor a talented, motivated team: Recruit, lead, and develop a high-performing team of CRO Scientific Leads, Operations Managers, and Compound Management professionals.

Skills and qualifications


Essential:

  • Ph.D. or Master's degree in Chemistry, Biology, Pharmacology, or a related life sciences discipline.
  • Substantial industry track record of biopharma R&D leadership, leading external research, discovery CRO management, or externalised discovery programs within biotech or pharma.
  • Technical breadth and working knowledge across medicinal/synthetic chemistry, in vitro screening cascades, in vivo pharmacology, and ADMET workflows.
  • Data-centric operational delivery, with proven experience instituting structured data collection frameworks with external vendors, including automated QC, data curation protocols, and machine-readable data transfers.
  • Practical experience of deploying modern productivity tools and automated workflow systems to streamline external research operations.
  • Commercial and financial acumen, with demonstrated success managing multi-million discovery budgets, negotiating complex vendor agreements (MSAs/SOWs), and partnering with corporate Procurement and Legal functions.
  • Proven track record of team leadership and influencing others in a matrix structure, including recruiting, mentoring, and organising operational teams while effectively driving alignment across cross-functional matrix leaders.
  • Familiarity with small molecules and complex or emerging modalities.

Nice to have:

  • AI-first mindset, with practical experience structuring chemical and biological data streams for machine learning workflows and automated DMTA cycles.
  • Exposure to or interest in applying agentic AI solutions to streamline external research operations.
  • Experience with biologics workflows.
Head of External Drug Discovery Operations at Isomorphic Labs
Position posted 2 days ago

Talk directly
to who's hiring

cord intros you to the companies worth joining, from seed to enterprise.

Everything you need to find work

Surface every relevant position, direct message the people hiring and manage all your applications in one place.

Get started

Every position in one place

We index the web for open positions that might be relevant to you and bring them all in one place.

Positions you might like split into tabs based on their type

Direct messaging

No more CV blackholes. Message people hiring directly and see their activity live on cord.

A sent message to a hiring manager
A board of positions in different stages

Application management

Manage all your applications and interviews in one place.

Advanced insights

Know your worth and see how you compare with other applicants.

Visualisation of a profile match score for a position and score comparison with other applicants

Direct.
Transparent.
Human.

On cord you can message people hiring directly, see when they were last active, how responsive they are and access transparent information that you wouldn't be able to find anywhere else.

Photos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling BankPhotos people at Starling Bank
Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
Message Alex Yeates at Starling Bank
Typically responds in an hour

What people are saying

2,000+

users joining every week

Oliver on cord

Oliver

Software Engineering Consultant
It's really easy to use, has a solid selection of jobs, and makes it helpful to direct message companies. The platform seems to offer a good range of opportunities while keeping the process simple and convenient.
November, 2025
David on cord

David

Lead Software Engineer
The platform allows you to create a professional CV, making the setup process simple and polished. The internal chat also provides an easy way to directly contact hiring companies, which makes communication much more efficient.
November, 2025
40,000+

open positions

Nicolae on cord

Nicolae

Senior Full Stack Developer
It is a great platform if you are looking for a job. It makes the search process straight forward and gives you access to solid opportunities.
November, 2025
3 million+

messages exchanged so far

Nicolae on cord

Nicolae

Senior Full Stack Developer
It is a great platform if you are looking for a job. It makes the search process straight forward and gives you access to solid opportunities.
November, 2025
83.45%

response rate from companies

Aarambha on cord

Aarambha

Associate Software Engineer
Absolutely amazing idea, the ability to see which recruiters are active makes finding opportunities very quick. There is a form of transparency built into the website that lacks in any other job searching platform.
August, 2025
Adam on cord

Adam

Senior Engineer
cord was great. Clean UI, easy to browse, and the data feature made it a breeze to quickly check whether my profile would match up well with a particular role. The messaging system made it easy to approach companies but also filter out unwanted requests.
August, 2025
4.6

score on Trustpilot

Talk directly to the people that matter

Join the hundred of thousands of people using cord to find work

Get started
 on cord
 on cord
 on cord
 on cord
 on cord
+468 joined last week
Moved to your Not right positions