Full-Time

Engagement Manager

Medra

Medra

51-200 employees

Automates lab experiments via AI-powered robotics

Compensation Overview

$140k - $215k/yr

+ Equity

San Francisco, CA, USA

In Person

Relocation benefits are available. Travel is required up to 25–50%.

Category
Customer Experience & Support (1)
Required Skills
CRM
Robotics

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Requirements
  • A technical background in Bioengineering, Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Computational Biology, Biological Sciences, or a related field.
  • At least 3 years of customer-facing experience in management or strategy consulting, business development in biopharma or biotech, technical deployments, or other strategic roles.
  • At least 3 years of experience working in a biological research lab in academia or industry, with technical fluency in scientific wet lab workflows.
  • A deep interest in the life sciences and eagerness to learn quickly.
  • A track record of successfully leading complex, high-stakes customer engagements requiring fast decision-making and tight internal and external coordination.
  • Experience collaborating cross-functionally with Engineering, Product, and Sales teams.
  • Customer obsession and a strong focus on understanding user needs and delivering impactful solutions.
  • A bias for action, solving immediate customer challenges while focusing on scalable, repeatable processes.
  • Strong communication, executive presence, and relationship-building capability.
  • An exceptional ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business value.
  • The ability to excel in ambiguous environments with minimal structure and no established playbook.
  • A low-ego, high-agency, team-first, and first-principles mindset.
Responsibilities
  • Own the customer relationship from pre-sale through post-sale, deployment, and expansion.
  • Embed with customer teams to assess key pain points, understand scientific workflows, and identify critical requirements.
  • Translate business objectives into a clear customer deployment roadmap, including milestones, dependencies, and success criteria.
  • Move between high-level strategy and execution-level detail to map engineering activities to overall goals, make complex technical trade-offs, and proactively forecast roadblocks.
  • Operate with extreme ownership and set the pace for the team to ensure timely delivery.
  • Design, track, and optimize customer success metrics to build the business case.
  • Build deep relationships with executive sponsors and act as a strategic thought partner on their science and artificial intelligence strategy.
  • Develop scalable customer-engagement playbooks and integrate customer feedback into product-development efforts.
Desired Qualifications
  • Past experience working at early-stage, high-growth startups.
  • Past experience working with robotics, hardware, or software engineers.

Medra builds a platform that speeds scientific research by automating lab work with AI and robotics. Its Continuous Science Platform has two parts: Physical AI, which uses general-purpose robots to perform lab tasks (like pipetting and handling samples) and connect with standard instruments, and Scientific AI, which analyzes experimental data to find patterns and suggest new experiments, creating a closed loop that learns from results. Scientists can give workflows in natural language, and the system runs experiments at a larger scale and faster pace than manual work. Medra differentiates itself by tightly integrating flexible robotic automation with AI-driven experiment design in a continuous feedback loop, supported by partnerships with biopharma and research organizations. Its goal is to remove data bottlenecks in biology and drug discovery by enabling rapid, high-throughput, automated laboratories.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Series A

Total Funding

$63M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2021

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • DARPA funded Medra in June 2026, validating dual-use autonomy and scientific reasoning.
  • Medra opened ML001 in April 2026 after 77 days, signaling rapid execution.
  • Nine open roles in July 2026 show hiring momentum despite capital efficiency concerns.

What critics are saying

  • Lila Sciences raised $550 million by October 2025; Medra faces a capital gulf.
  • Autonomous labs depend on brittle instrument integrations; one failed workflow stalls customer deployments.
  • If closed-loop results never outperform manual labs, Medra becomes a demo company.

What makes Medra unique

  • ML001 closed beta began April 2026; Medra runs experiments end-to-end in one lab.
  • June 2026 AI Experimentalist translates natural-language goals into executable protocols and refinements.
  • Genentech integration with LIMS and ML stacks anchors Medra inside real biopharma workflows.

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Benefits

Remote Work Options

Paid Vacation

Telework not specified

Flexible Work Hours

401(k) Retirement Plan

401(k) Company Match

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Wellness Program

Mental Health Support

Conference Attendance Budget

Professional Development Budget

Stock Options

Company Equity

Hybrid Work Options

Employee Referral Bonus

Paid Holidays

Paid Sick Leave

Paid Vacation

Company Social Events

Phone/Internet Stipend

Home Office Stipend

Relocation Assistance

Adoption Assistance

Family Planning Benefits

Fertility Treatment Support

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

↑ 39%

1 year growth

↑ 32%

2 year growth

↑ 32%
HPCwire
Jun 26th, 2026
Medra launches AI Experimentalist and announces DARPA collaboration.

Medra launches AI Experimentalist and announces DARPA collaboration. June 26, 2026 Press play to listen to this content DARPA-funded effort will use Medra's new scientific reasoning layer inside ML001, the company's flagship autonomous science lab SAN FRANCISCO, June 26, 2026 - Medra has launched the AI Experimentalist, the scientific reasoning layer of its Physical AI Scientist Platform, and announced a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As part of this DARPA-funded project, Medra is advancing its platform's capabilities to translate natural-language scientific goals and human-written protocols into machine-executable experiments that can be measured, learned from, and improved over time. DARPA is an independent research and development agency within the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for breakthrough technologies for national security. Scientists can specify high-level research objectives, and Medra's AI Experimentalist translates them into executable experimental plans. Unlike AI tools that focus on a single stage of the scientific workflow, the AI Experimentalist spans the full experimental cycle: from reviewing literature and designing experiments to coordinating wet-lab execution, analyzing results, and refining protocols for subsequent runs. By closing the loop between planning, execution, and learning, it enables experiments to be carried out with minimal human intervention while keeping scientists in control of research goals. The AI Experimentalist works in concert with Medra's Physical AI Lab, a wet-lab execution layer. Together they form the Physical AI Scientist platform, a closed-loop system that tightly couples scientific reasoning and experimentation. With a model-agnostic agentic harness and a multi-agent architecture, the platform can incorporate frontier AI capabilities alongside scientific agents and prediction models. Partners can access Medra's AI Experimentalist through Physical AI Labs deployed on site at customer facilities or operated remotely through Medra Lab 001 (ML001), Medra's flagship autonomous science laboratory. Built in 77 days and opened in April 2026, select closed-beta projects are now live across academia, biopharma, and government, including DARPA. ML001 is currently running and developing assays in antibody discovery, protein engineering, gene editing, and cell biology. "With frontier models becoming increasingly capable of predicting novel molecules and generating scientific hypotheses, the bottleneck in science is shifting toward the ability to validate those predictions," said Michelle Lee, founder and CEO of Medra. "But running experiments is not just about robotic execution. Assay development and parameter tuning often take months of experimentation and refinement. The AI Experimentalist enables autonomous, end-to-end experimental design with a Physical AI lab in the loop." About Medra Medra is building the Physical AI Scientist, a closed-loop system that tightly integrates AI scientific reasoning and experimentation. Founded in 2022, Medra has raised over $60M from investors including Human Capital, Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Catalio Capital, Neo, 776, and Fusion Fund. Medra launched ML001 in San Francisco as the largest autonomous lab in the U.S. Most quantum computing announcements revolve around hardware: more qubits, new processors, and better error correction... Nvidia this week highlighted an early deployment of its Vera CPU at Los Alamos National... After tracking quantum computing for years, Intersect360 Research says the market has matured enough to... The world spent more than $300 billion on AI data centers in 2025, representing a... As previously noted, the Seventh National Research Platform (7NRP) workshop was held in La Jolla,... A recent paper submitted to ArXiv by famed HPC scientist Satoshi Matsuoka, Director of the...

Associated Press
Jun 24th, 2026
Medra launches AI Experimentalist and secures DARPA funding after raising $60M

Medra, an autonomous science company, has launched its AI Experimentalist and announced a collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The AI Experimentalist translates natural-language scientific goals into machine-executable experiments across the full experimental cycle, from literature review to protocol refinement. The system works alongside Medra's Physical AI Lab to form a closed-loop platform. Partners can access the technology through on-site deployments or remotely via Medra Lab 001, the company's flagship autonomous laboratory in San Francisco, which opened in April 2026 after 77 days of construction. The facility is running projects across academia, biopharma and government in antibody discovery, protein engineering, gene editing and cell biology. Founded in 2022, Medra has raised over $60 million from investors including Human Capital, Lux Capital and Menlo Ventures.

Warp News
May 5th, 2026
Medra raises $52M to build autonomous lab where robots follow everyday language instructions

Medra has raised $52 million to build a 38,000-square-foot autonomous robot laboratory in the Bay Area, bringing total funding to $63 million. The round was led by Human Capital. The startup develops software enabling scientists to direct laboratory robots using everyday language, similar to ChatGPT. The robots conduct drug research around the clock for partners including Genentech and Addition Therapeutics, logging every experimental detail to train AI models. Founded in 2022 by Stanford robotics PhD Michelle Lee, Medra currently has five paid installations across the United States. The new facility, built in 90 days, will house hundreds of robots generating experimental data to improve AI models for scientific research. The system can operate over 75% of instruments used in laboratories today.

X Corp.
Apr 23rd, 2026
Medra CEO Michelle Lee announces America's largest autonomous lab — 100s of robots, zero coffee breaks

Medra founder & CEO Michelle Lee (ex-Stanford AI Lab, Nvidia, SpaceX) announces the opening of America's largest autonomous laboratory, featuring hundreds of robots running experiments with zero human intervention. Mission: eradicate disease through AI-powered robotic lab automation.

Live Forever Club CIC
Dec 22nd, 2025
Medra raises $11M to automate lab work with AI-powered robots

Medra, a robotics and AI startup founded by Stanford PhD Michelle Lee, has raised $11 million in early funding to automate scientific laboratory work. The company is developing robots and software that can interact with standard lab equipment by reading screens, pressing buttons and handling physical tasks currently performed by human technicians. Unlike traditional lab robotics that work with limited instruments, Medra's platform combines AI with robotics to adapt to new equipment and workflows autonomously. The technology aims to move beyond pre-programmed sequences to perform a broader range of routine experiments and data collection tasks. Early interest from biotech companies indicates demand for solutions that reduce manual labour and accelerate research. The startup's approach integrates AI directly into experimental workflows, potentially shortening research timelines whilst allowing scientists to focus on higher-level problems.