Director of Technical Business Development

About Us:

Culture’s mission is to simplify bioprocess development and make it as fast and easy to scale bioprocesses, as it is to scale software. With this mission, Culture’s first offering enables biopharma, biotechnology, and synthetic biology companies to execute their bioprocessing R&D in the cloud. Our clients design, manage, and analyze bioprocess experiments in Culture’s Console web application. Culture’s offering enables customers to focus on designing and improving their processes versus spending time and effort building out their own high-throughput process development laboratories. Customers remotely observe their processes and analyze data while their experiments are executed in Culture’s cloud-connected bioreactor facility in South San Francisco. The facility is enabled by Culture’s proprietary 250mL and 5L single-use bioreactor technology and software systems.

At Culture, we combine our passions for biomanufacturing, engineering, and operations to build new solutions that make bioprocess development faster. We value curiosity, communication, collaboration, a customer focused mindset and a drive for results.

The Opportunity:

Culture Biosciences is looking for a  Director of Technical Business Development to be our technical expert on the commercial team. This opportunity is ideal for an experienced upstream bioprocess development expert. This role is responsible for our external communications with prospective and existing clients and strategic partners about technical matters. The Director of Technical Business Development is a key leadership position and is a member of the Chief Commercial Officer’s leadership team.

What you’ll do:

Strategy component:

• Lead a team of technical experts on the commercial team, starting with 1 full-time report.
• Develop the technical engagement component of the sales process.
• Collaborate with marketing to create a roadmap of technical papers and presentations that demonstrate Culture’s capabilities.
• Partner with sales and marketing to design campaigns that build pipelines of new customers.
• Partner with operational teams to develop processes to onboard new clients into our services.
• Develop the applications strategy for our services business, incorporating insights from customers and the market. In other words, determine the roadmap for which processes and capabilities our services support.
• Provide technical advising and support to product and engineering teams.

Execution component:

• Partner with sales team members to bring prospective clients through the sales process, including communicating Culture’s capabilities in sales meetings.
• Develop relationships with clients’ technical team members as a part of the sales process and identify how Culture’s offerings can support clients’ programs.
• Drive brand recognition by representing Culture at industry events and conferences.
• Build a pipeline of prospective customers for Culture, utilizing your extensive network within bioprocessing.
• Partner with executive team members to form strategic partnerships with bioprocessing services and tools providers.
• Partner with marketing to write website copy, white papers, and technical materials about Culture’s offerings.
• Mentor and guide members of your team.

About you:

• You have a bachelor’s or advanced degree in Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, Chemistry, Biology, or a related field. Ph. D preferred.
• You are a bioprocessing expert with more than 15 years of experience in the industry.
• You are an effective written and verbal communicator.
• You have experience transferring processes between sites and scaling up bioprocesses from small to large scale.
• You have experience designing and executing process development, optimization, and characterization campaigns for upstream biologics manufacturing processes.
• You have experience preparing and presenting technical work at industry conferences.
• Ideally, you have experience with both microbial and mammalian cell lines and have experience develop processes for cell and gene therapies (i.e. viral vectors, plasmid, mRNA IVT, allogenic/autologous cell therapies).
• You have experience collaborating with sales, business development, marketing, and product management teams.

Location & Schedule: 

• This is a hybrid or remote position, depending on candidates’ locations. Preference for candidates based in a major US biotech hub: Bay Area, Boston, NY/NJ/PA tri-state area, RTP-NC, Seattle, or San Diego. Expected travel of up to 25%.

Base Salary Range:

• Culture Biosciences's c