Associate Director / Director, In Vivo Pharmacology

The Role:

Your mission is to make three connected in vivo workstreams succeed:

1. Screens. Ensure the in vivo experiments that generate novel target hits are executed cleanly and on schedule.
2. Target validation. Own the validation of screen hits with indication and ex vivo experts, define defensible evidence standards, and recommend which targets are strong enough to enter drug discovery.
3. Drug discovery. Design pharmacodynamic and efficacy studies for targets in discovery, including small-molecule programs, and establish the evidence needed for program decisions.

Across all three you are Gordian’s design authority: model, modality, dose, route, controls, timepoints, group size, and statistical power. You will use pilots to retire risk, establish exposure and pharmacodynamics before efficacy, and — when a proposed experiment cannot answer its question — explain why and help the team build a better plan.

You will choose among oligonucleotides, AAV, and small molecules according to what each question requires, and you will bring in or build new disease models, delivery routes, and readouts when existing capabilities are insufficient. You do not need deep hands-on experience with every modality, but you must understand their in vivo strengths and limitations well enough to choose correctly and challenge a specialist's design.

You will lead a team of nine scientists, research associates, and a Vivarium Manager, with four direct reports. You will develop team members from strong executors into scientists who can design and own studies independently. You will also own vivarium performance and IACUC compliance through the Vivarium Manager, including capacity planning, husbandry standards, protocol maintenance, and inspection readiness.

One thing to be clear about: This is a leadership role with real laboratory presence. Roughly 80% of your value is strategy, design, troubleshooting, and management — but the remaining 20% is your presence on the floor, and it is not a formality. You will not be running studies yourself; you have a team of excellent people who do that. You will be in the lab most days to train them, to watch experiments actually happen, to catch problems before they become data, and to know first-hand what is going on rather than being told. 

In your first month, learn Gordian’s platform and our obesity, heart failure, and kidney programs; establish your management cadence; lead the weekly in vivo meeting; and take over vivarium operations and IACUC status.

By two months, all four direct reports and the vivarium report to you, and you approve every in vivo study design before it starts. In partner meetings, you present Gordian's in vivo data and study plans and answer design questions. You also write and sign off on the in vivo sections of partner proposals and study plans.

By three months, every new in vivo study goes through a written design review before animals are ordered. The review covers the question, primary endpoint, power calculation, controls, and the go/no-go criteria the result will decide. You also own the validation plan and timeline for targets under our major pharma partnership, and you present the results at partner reviews.

By six months, have the obesity, heart failure, kidney, and small-molecule programs delivering to schedule; prevent avoidable study repeats through stronger design; add at least one new in vivo capability; and have multiple scientists independently owning experiments from design through interpretation.

And You:

You have a track record of success in high-agency work, consistently creating momentum rather than waiting for direction.

You want to do your best work alongside exceptional teammates and are energized by environments where people push each other to think more clearly, work at a higher standard, and grow into better versions of themselves.

You truly want to play a key role in an early-stage startup validating new targets for intractable diseases of aging: a fast-paced environment full of both uncertainty and new challenges, demanding relentless resourcefulness.

You have deep obesity and metabolic in vivo expertise. You have personally run and interpreted rodent obesity and metabolic efficacy studies — DIO and/or genetic models — inside a program where the result drove a real decision, and you know what it takes to make those results trustworthy. You bring 5+ years of this inside industry discovery programs (10 preferred), with responsibility for program-level deliverables.

Your technical judgment is earned, not inherited. You have personally run rodent studies — dosing, blood collection, takedowns, tissue harvest — for long enough that you can tell good technique from bad on sight, teach it, and diagnose a study that is not working. You have not been away from the bench so long that you would struggle to demonstrate a method yourself.

You design studies exceptionally well. You size groups from power calculations rather than from habit, choose controls and timepoints that make a result interpretable, and say clearly what a design will and will not be able to conclude. You recognise when a proposed study is larger than the question requires, and you default to a pilot before a large cohort and to establishing exposure and PD before running efficacy.

You are fluent in small molecule in vivo pharmacology, and you understand what oligonucleotide and AAV approaches can and cannot deliver in vivo well enough to choose between modalities. Hands-on experience with all three is not expected.

You have managed scientists and technical staff, trained people on technique yourself, and take real satisfaction in growing them.

You communicate so that decisions follow. You can explain a result and its limits to chemistry, computational, or executive colleagues; you can tell a program lead no and have the reasoning land; and you are credible presenting and defending data to external partners.

Additional valuable skills if you have them

• In vivo experience with oligonucleotides (ASO or siRNA), or with AAV and gene therapy.
• Direct experience with HFpEF, CKD, or atherosclerosis models.
• Advanced phenotyping: echocardiography, invasive hemodynamics, indirect calorimetry, EchoMRI or DEXA, or glucose clamps.
• Experience building or scaling a vivarium or an in vivo group from small scale.
• Partner- or BD-facing experience presenting preclinical data.
• A peer-reviewed publication record in metabolic or cardiovascular physiology.

The Details: 

This is an onsite leadership role in South San Francisco because regular laboratory presence is central to the work. Gordian offers meaningful equity, a competitive salary, full health, dental, vision, and life insurance, a 401(k) with match, onsite lunch three days a week, an onsite gym, an unlimited vacation policy, and access to world-class mentors and advisors.

Are you ready to lead the in vivo function at the center of Gordian’s target-discovery engine — from the screens that generate novel targets, through the studies that decide which ones advance, to the pharmacology that turns them into drugs?

Gordian is the leader in applying in vivo screening for target discovery. Almost everything we know that our competitors do not, we learned inside a living animal. As Head of In Vivo Pharmacology, you will decide which models and experiments can answer the company’s most important questions, lead a nine-person team, and turn rigorous in vivo pharmacology into clear portfolio decisions across our cardiometabolic portfolio.

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 our website and in our preprint). The machine is already producing wins: across six disease areas, we have mapped nearly as many targets as the field reported in 20 years, advanced a novel 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 culture here.

This way of working has been crucial to Gordian’s success.