Full-Time

E11 Bio – Operations Lead

Cultivarium

Cultivarium

51-200 employees

Non-profit incubator launching Focused Research Organizations

Compensation Overview

$180k - $200k/yr

+ 401K Match

Alameda, CA, USA

In Person

Category
Operations & Logistics (1)
Required Skills
Forecasting
Requirements
  • Eight or more years of experience in operational roles within technical or scientific organizations with a track record of successful operational leadership.
  • Experience directly mentoring and managing individual contributors.
  • Strong financial literacy, including budget review, forecasting, and vendor contract oversight.
  • Experience building or scaling operational systems in a growing organization.
  • Proven ability to execute strategy through operational excellence.
  • Demonstrated project management experience.
  • Experience advising leadership on personnel management.
  • Strong judgment, risk assessment, and organizational design skills.
  • Excellent communication skills and ability to build alignment across senior stakeholders.
  • Ability to work onsite in a highly collaborative, mission-driven environment.
  • Strong references from managers, peers, and direct reports.
Responsibilities
  • Guide project planning processes across programs to ensure clarity of priorities, timelines, and interdependencies.
  • Track project status across initiatives, proactively flagging risk and improving cross-project communication.
  • Reduce organizational risk by daylighting project blockers, coordinating managerial response, and ensuring disciplined follow-through.
  • Directly manage the operations team, including the Scientific Operations Manager, Lab Manager, and Office Coordinator.
  • Introduce and institutionalize best practices in operational management.
  • Evolve internal processes to be scalable, robust, and resilient as the organization grows.
  • Forecast resource needs 1–2 quarters in advance, including capital purchases and operational capacity.
  • Strengthen planning cadence and execution discipline across teams.
  • Review and approve invoices and bill payments.
  • Review budget sheets and general ledger coding for accuracy and alignment.
  • Support financial forecasting and expenditure discipline across programs.
  • Oversee contracts related to partnerships, facilities, vendors, and contractors in coordination with legal and accounting partners.
  • Provide direct supervision, coaching, and development to members of the operations team.
  • Offer developmentally relevant feedback and mentorship to managers and senior contributors across the organization.
  • Introduce best practices in personnel management, performance feedback, and accountability.
  • Strengthen a culture of professionalism, mutual respect, and operational excellence.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experienced with meeting management and group dynamics: Driving the agenda, keeping the meeting on track, surfacing action items and tracking them to completion.
  • Specific experience related to Neurotechnology, biotechnology, or a related scientific field.
  • Experience in a research-focused nonprofit or startup environment.
  • Familiarity with capital equipment planning and laboratory infrastructure scaling.

Convergent Research acts as a non-profit incubator that identifies high-impact scientific or technological fields and launches focused research organizations (FROs) to work on large-scale, coordinated, non-profit projects. It brings together scientific founders and funders to design, launch, and operate these FROs, attracting top talent from academia, industry, and startups. Its products include FROs such as E11 Bio, which develops tools to map brain circuitry, and the Gap Map, a web portal that helps identify gaps in the research landscape. Unlike typical for-profit startups or grant-making programs, Convergent Research fills a structural gap by coordinating philanthropy and research to accelerate progress in critical areas. The company aims to accelerate scientific and technological progress for society by funding, organizing, and operating ambitious, high-impact research programs through its FRO model.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Grant

Total Funding

$2M

Headquarters

Palo Alto, California

Founded

2021

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Pharma giants like Genentech partner with microbe repositories boosting Cultivarium's open-access model.
  • Extremophile enzymes market hits $2.8B by 2028 for sustainable bioprocessing applications.
  • NSF SBIR Phase II awards in 2025-2026 fund Cultivarium's nonprofit microbial infrastructure.

What critics are saying

  • Convergent Research diverts Schmidt Futures funding to synthetic biology FROs within 12-24 months.
  • Ginkgo Bioworks scales microbe engineering 10x faster capturing Cultivarium's licensing deals in 6-12 months.
  • Arc Institute's open-source foundry obsoletes Cultivarium's model bankrupting it in 24-36 months.

What makes Cultivarium unique

  • Cultivarium develops high-throughput culturing platforms for non-model microbes like archaea and extremophiles.
  • Open-source portal indexes 170,000+ strains with protocols for bacteria, fungi, archaea, and protists.
  • FRO structure releases free tools and data to democratize access to extraordinary microbes.

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Your Connections

People at Cultivarium who can refer or advise you

Benefits

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Paid Vacation

Paid Holidays

401(k) Company Match

Wellness Program

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

10%

1 year growth

14%

2 year growth

10%
FinSMEs
May 15th, 2025
Imprint Labs Secures $15M Funding

Imprint Labs, a NYC-based research organization, raised $15M in philanthropic funding from backers including Eric and Wendy Schmidt, Convergent Research, Peter Reinhart, and NYCEDC. The funds will be used to advance their work in decoding immune memory to uncover causes of chronic diseases. Led by CEO Beck Brachman, the company focuses on forensic immunology and was incubated by Cornell Tech.

Business Wire
Mar 11th, 2024
Convergent Research Announces Major New Funding Commitment To Forest Neurotech

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Convergent Research today announced a new $14 million funding commitment from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to Forest Neurotech, an initiative designed to create next-generation brain-computer-interfaces (BCIs) for individuals with neurological injuries or diseases. In addition to support from Eric Schmidt, Forest Neurotech has received funding from Griffin Catalyst, the philanthropic organization of Citadel CEO Kenneth C. Griffin, the Riley Susan Bechtel Foundation, and James Fickel. Forest Neurotech is developing a novel ultrasound-based BCI that can sense and modulate the whole brain without penetrating it. Most BCIs rely on invasive procedures that access a limited region of the brain while damaging brain tissue and causing harmful biological responses. Forest’s ultrasound technology reaches deep into the brain, providing researchers with a minimally invasive platform to develop diagnostics, monitoring, and therapeutics across the whole brain

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Oct 26th, 2023
Grants | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Our mission is to make the world a better place through the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Forbes
Feb 15th, 2023
Ben Reinhardt Is On A Mission To Make Sci-Fi A Reality

A Science Fiction future inspired by Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota Series Jocelynn PearlWhen Ben Reinhardt was an undergrad at Caltech, he often passed a mural painted on the back of a building on campus. It included a quote from Theodore von Kármán, a scientist and engineer who served as the first director of JPL: "Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been." Since his days as an undergrad, Reinhardt’s been trying to build the world as it could be, one filled with the imaginings of science fiction novels like Ada Palmer’s Terra LUNA3 Ignota Series.But a recent paper published in Nature described a decline in scientific progress over the last few decades. It’s a trend that many have been speaking out about for years, among them Reinhardt and a cohort of individuals who study ‘the science of science’, which some have coined metascience.Papers and patents are using narrower portions of existing knowledge. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x/figures/6Reinhardt went on to get his PhD with a particular desire: to build spaceships. But he found that academia wasn’t quite the right venue for making progress, so he joined a startup working on augmented reality. That wasn’t quite right either