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Elio builds adaptive sensing technology powered by artificial intelligence, with applications across life sciences, semiconductor metrology, robotics, and defense. The company's core innovation is reconfigurable optics that compute on light itself and adapt in real time, enabling sensors to explore and direct information capture rather than recording a fixed view.
In life sciences, this technology enables label-free observation inside living cells, resolution of phenotypic detail that conventional imaging averages away, and high-content screening at scale on three-dimensional samples like organoids and tumor models.
You will serve as Head of Product for the Life Sciences segment, owning the definition and development of Elio's platform for pharmaceutical research, biotechnology, contract research organizations, and academic institutions. This is a customer-facing, product-accountable role with decision responsibility over the life sciences roadmap and the engineering capacity allocated to the segment. You do not carry a revenue quota.
Key Responsibilities:
- Define and maintain the life sciences product roadmap, including which assays and applications the platform supports and in what sequence. Hold decision responsibility over scope and prioritization, and represent those decisions to customers and internal stakeholders.
- Establish the evidentiary standard required for each supported application, including comparisons, controls, sample types, and reproducibility criteria. Determine what validation work Elio performs and hold accountability for meeting the defined standard.
- Own the progression from initial customer evaluation to operational deployment for an agreed set of accounts, ensuring that capability developed in those engagements generalizes to subsequent customers.
- Define, for each supported application, the configurations, protocols, outputs, and performance characteristics available to customers, including in cases where no prior specification exists.
- Recommend segment prioritization across biopharma, biotechnology, contract research organizations, and academia, and the build-versus-partner strategy for evidence generation.
- Contribute life sciences requirements to platform-level prioritization with the optics, artificial intelligence, and software teams.
- Lead customer evaluations, technical presentations, and scientific engagement at conferences and customer sites.
- Participate in hiring as the life sciences function expands.
You will work directly with pharmaceutical research organizations, biotechnology companies, contract research organizations, and academic institutions, translating customer engagement into product decisions rather than passing requests to engineering. A central requirement is distinguishing opportunities that generalize into product capability from those that would consume development capacity without producing reusable value.
Requirements:
- Master's degree or Ph.D. in Biology, Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, Bioengineering, Biomedical Engineering, Biotechnology, or a related life sciences discipline.
- 10+ years of professional experience across product management, applications, market development, or scientific partnerships within the life sciences industry, including direct ownership of product definition.
- Substantive understanding of biology research, drug discovery workflows, and pharmaceutical research and development.
- Experience at a scientific instrumentation or platform company selling into pharmaceutical research and development, including familiarity with laboratory evaluation, validation, and adoption processes.
- Demonstrated experience establishing evidentiary standards for scientific claims and directing the validation work required to meet them, including the standards applied by pharmaceutical research organizations before adopting a new measurement method.
- Direct experience with pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, contract research organizations, or academic research institutions, and a working understanding of how their procurement and adoption behavior differs.
- Demonstrated ability to author product specifications in the absence of an existing standard, and to decline non-generalizable customer opportunities.
- Ability to work effectively with optics, artificial intelligence, and software engineering teams and to sustain a technical position with them.
- Strong written and verbal communication with scientific and technical audiences.
- Willingness to travel for customer, partner, and conference engagements.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with advanced imaging, computational biology, artificial intelligence applied to life sciences, or high-content screening.
- Experience establishing a product function within an early-stage company.
