Head of Business Development

About the Role

You will lead business development across pharma, diagnostics, and synthetic biology. Your job is to turn scientific interest into partnerships the company should sign: choosing the right accounts, establishing a credible path to funding, and closing the deal.

Our largest partnerships are led by a product and business development pair. The product lead owns the technical scope, evaluation design, and scientific relationship. You own the commercial process: qualification, stakeholder strategy, deal structure, negotiation, and close.

Many of our partnerships combine model access, research, data, and downstream rights in ways that do not fit an established template. You will create the structures, close the first versions, and make the repeatable ones easier to execute again.

What You’ll Do

• Originate and close partnerships across pharma, diagnostics, and synthetic biology.
• Own the commercial workstream from qualification through signature, alongside a product lead who owns technical scope and scientific execution.
• Map how each account makes decisions: who wants the work, who can fund it, whose approval is required, and what could prevent it from moving.
• Qualify opportunities before they consume research time. Establish whether there is a real budget, a decision-maker, and a plausible path from technical evaluation to a funded program.
• Structure research collaborations, platform-access agreements, licenses, and co-development partnerships. Negotiate economics, intellectual property, data rights, field restrictions, governance, and downstream rights with company leadership and counsel.
• Build account strategy with product leads. They determine what we can commit to technically; you determine what the commitment should be worth and what we need in return..
• Work with our Head of Data Acquisition when data access forms part of a broader commercial partnership.
• Establish the qualification, account-planning, and deal-review practices the company will use as partnership volume grows, and build the business development team over time.
• Coordinate with our Head of Biodefense when a government partnership includes a commercial component.

What We’re Looking for

• You have personally led and closed complex life sciences partnerships, and can explain what you did from first substantive conversation through signature.
• You have relationships with decision-makers in at least one of our core markets and know how to build credibility in accounts where you do not.
• You understand how large life sciences companies fund and approve work across research, business development, legal, procurement, data governance, and executive leadership.
• You are technically fluent enough to understand what our models can do, identify where a proposed commitment outruns the evidence, and represent Radical credibly with scientific leaders.
• You can distinguish a serious commercial opportunity from an interesting research conversation, and you are willing to end the latter before it consumes the team.
• You are comfortable creating deal structures and internal processes before there is a standard playbook.
• You know how to structure and negotiate platform, discovery, licensing, or co-development agreements, including the tradeoffs among upfront economics, intellectual property, exclusivity, data rights, milestones, and downstream participation.
• You have worked alongside a scientific or technical lead and know how to divide ownership without confusing the customer or undermining your counterpart.
• Excitement about building a generational company and pioneering how AI is commercialized in life sciences.