Chief of Staff

Atomic AI, Inc. is a well-funded, series A biotech company ($42M) transforming the rational design of molecules and medicines through the cutting-edge fusion of artificial intelligence and structural biology. Atomic’s unique R&D platform, based on research featured on the cover of Science, provides new strategies to treat or cure previously undruggable diseases by targeting RNA structure. We are an interdisciplinary team working across computational and experimental biology and believe that our strongest asset is our people.  

The opportunity

As a central team member who is a thought partner and direct report to the CEO, Raphael Townshend, this role requires a highly resourceful, detail-oriented and thoroughly organized individual with self-motivation, strong analytical skills, a high level of professionalism, and discretion. 

At Atomic AI, you will be an execution-focused self-starter with a passion for scientific research and a willingness to roll-up your sleeves when facing challenges both big and small. You will prioritize effectively amidst complexity, adapt nimbly to changing conditions, and grow outside of your comfort zone. You will collaborate thoughtfully and promote the success of all team members. Our goal is for the Chief of Staff to evolve into a functional leader as the company matures.

Investors

Major Investors: 8VC, Greylock, FactoryHQ ($7M Seed); Playground Capital ($35M A)

Notable Angel Investors: Nat Friedman, Doug Mohr, Neal Khosla, and Patrick Hsu

Responsibilities

• Develop and run management processes that provide leverage to the executive team. This involves helping steer execution, providing the C-Suite updates on the progression of projects, monitoring and communicating progress towards goals and deadlines
• Lead strategic initiatives from ideation to implementation, including but not limited to developing and operationalizing a strategy for government / philanthropic partnerships, fundraising, long-range planning etc.
• Own high-priority meetings for the CEO including  all Board, investor, and major partnership interactions. Build presentations and other deliverables on behalf of the CEO for the Board, investors, and external partners
• Facilitate company-wide communications and programming (e.g. all-hands, offsites, other events); embody and promote Atomic AI’s values and help foster a positive company culture
• Collaborate with every department within the company cross-functionally and lead cross-functional special projects to improve overall organizational efficiency and effectiveness
• Take key actions from meetings and ensure they are followed up and delivered on by the appropriate teams and leaders 
• Manage a broad array of external vendors, including contract management
• Own tracking and measurement of company OKRs and goals

About you

• 4-8 years of relevant job experience across any combination of high-growth startups, life sciences industry, management consulting, investment banking / investing or scientific research
• Must have strong ability in gathering data, analyzing it, recommending a course of action and supporting its execution 
• Strong organizational skills are paramount. Previous experience juggling multiple projects, managing expectations, and  presenting to and working with executives
• You instinctively know how to prioritize the highest value use of the executive team’s time and how to connect the dots between teams and leads to enable the best performance
• Exceptional communication skills both written and verbal; ability to present issues in a clear and concise way
• Flexible to the needs of the organization when it comes to your day-to-day responsibilities; you leave your ego at the door and are eager to tackle issues both big and small wherever you can be helpful
• Demonstrated leadership and project management skills

Pluses

• You know how to see the bigger picture and think like an owner
• You have experience working in the biotechnology or pharmaceutical industries on the partnerships / business development teams 

Salary Range: $150,000/year to $180,000+/year + equity + benefits

About the Company: 

Atomic is building a cutting-edge ML-based approach for discovering and developing RNA targeting therapeutics for undruggable diseases. The ambition would be to build a company similar to Recursion or insitro with both ML expertise to drive the therapeutic discovery and pharmaceutical expertise to capture more of the value chain associated with drug development over time.

The company is founded by Raphael Townshend who is an exceptional technologist out of the Stanford PhD program and DeepMind's AlphaGo Team (he was ranked at the very top of his peer group for his PhD). He has recruited a very strong initial team of engineers and scientists out of Stanford and Google as his founding teammates. And their immediate focus will be building out the software team and adding pharmaceutical operational capability, so they can own more of the drug development lifecycle.

Raphael's work was accepted to Science and has won the "RNA puzzles" competition — an important global competition for the highest efficacy approach to identify and predict RNA structures. Their approach is very similar to the recently published Google DeepMind AlphaFold work which was focused on protein structure prediction. In some ways, Raphael aims to build AlphaFold for RNA.

If successful, this approach could help discover a class of new therapeutics that target RNA structures to treat different human diseases and become the foundation for an AI-enabled drug development company that could reach meaningful scale with a primary exit. And there's also a lot of secular interest and tailwind in RNA-targeted therapeutics from traditional pharma companies to large software companies to AI-enabled biotech companies as well. Lots of premium buyers in this space.