People Operations Associate

Are you ready to help build the team that runs Gordian’s cure machine and strengthen the culture that enables it to do extraordinary work?

In this role, you will help Gordian hire exceptional people by moving candidates through a fast, coordinated, high-touch recruiting funnel. You will progressively take ownership of the recruiting funnel through recruiter screens and create intentional events that strengthen morale and connection.

Journey + Destination:

Gordian Biotechnology is a therapeutics company designed as a machine that systematically reveals the right way to cure age-related diseases: a machine for creating time.

To do that, we built Mosaic Screening, which makes causal validation both grounded in human pathophysiology and radically more scalable in living diseased tissue. It lets us measure the causal 

effects of hundreds of perturbations directly in vivo, which reveals therapeutic maxima across vast target spaces (more details on ourwebsite and preprint). The machine is already producing wins: across six disease areas, we have mapped nearlyas many targets as the field reported in 20 years, advanced anovel osteoarthritis candidate into IND-enabling studies, and started an obesity drug-discovery collaboration with Pfizer. 

But there are still many diseases left to cure, and expanding the machine to tackle them starts with its most important resource: its people and culture. We work as a team, using clear goals, open communication, and direct feedback to make autonomous decisions with the bigger picture in mind. We aim for extraordinary outcomes, continually improving how we work and acting on what will create the most progress, even in unknown territory. We have deliberately designed an environment to sustain that standard: few standing meetings, hands-on experimentation and pre-mortems, weekly team lunches, and unlimited vacation that people are encouraged to use. You can dive deeper into our culturehere.

This way of working has been crucial to Gordian’s success. In this role, you will help strengthen the cure machine and build the team that takes it even further, enabling Gordian to tackle one disease after another.

About the Role:

Your mission as an Operations Associate at Gordian is to help build the team that runs the cure machine and strengthen the culture that enables it to do extraordinary work. You will keep candidates moving through a fast, well-coordinated hiring process while giving them an exceptional experience from first outreach through offer. As you ramp, you will progressively take tactical ownership of sourcing, outreach, and recruiter screens, and own and expand events that strengthen morale and connection. You will build the scientific fluency to speak credibly with candidates and improve the systems that reduce hiring friction and make recruiting scalable.

Within your first two weeks, you would have learned Gordian’s recruiting process, candidate-experience standards, science, mission, and core tools, and taken full ownership of interview scheduling and onsite coordination, keeping the process moving smoothly while serving as a warm and responsive point of contact for candidates and interviewers.

By six weeks, you would be sourcing candidates through LinkedIn Recruiter and Gordian’s LLM-assisted workflows to bring new candidates into our hiring pipelines, independently running smooth onsite interview days, executing a team event and planning an industry event, and reducing friction in recruiting workflows while scoping onboarding automation in Rippling.

By three months, you would be independently conducting calibrated recruiter screens, building hiring pipelines across multiple roles and serving as Gordian’s Rippling expert, with measurable improvements in scheduling friction and time-to-hire.  You would also own an increasingly intentional events calendar and the execution of onboarding and offboarding.

About You: 

You care deeply about talent as a force multiplier and want to become exceptional at identifying and bringing together people who build and scale new ways of discovering medicines.

You’re a natural relationship-builder and effective communicator across a variety of mediums, and work comfortably with candidates, internal stakeholders, and external partners. You make every interaction feel warm and organized, and can translate technical and scientific material into plain, compelling language without losing accuracy or substance.

You have a track record of creating momentum in high-agency work and want to do your best work alongside exceptional teammates. You’re energized by the pace and ambiguity of an early-stage biotech startup, bringing flexibility, intellectual curiosity, sound judgment, genuine passion for biotech, and a tendency to think outside the box.

You’re comfortable with modern productivity, collaboration, and recruiting systems, and willing to learn Rippling quickly and deeply. You’re also curious about experimenting with LLMs and AI tools to improve sourcing, streamline recurring workflows, and scale your impact.

Prior recruiting or HR experience is not required. Curiosity, hunger to learn this space, and strong alignment with Gordian’s values matter far more.

Additional valuable skills if you have them

• A bachelor’s degree, particularly in business, hr, or communications
• 1-2 years of relevant work experience
• Experience coordinating multiple calendars, travel plans, or onsite interview days
• Event-planning instincts, including thinking about intent and impact rather than just logistics
• Experience at a startup with fewer than 50 people or in biotech

The Details: 

Gordian aims to provide everything you need to thrive. Beyond our community and science, you’ll have enough equity to be a true stakeholder in the company, competitive salary, full health/dental/vision/life insurance, 401k with match, onsite lunch paid for 3 days a week, basic onsite gym, whatever vacation you need to be at your peak, and access to world-class mentors and advisors to support your professional growth. Our building is in the heart of the biotech capital of South San Francisco.