Drug Discovery Resource Outsourcing Manager

About Absci

Absci is a clinical-stage biotechnology company advancing novel therapeutics using generative AI. Our Integrated Drug Creation™ platform combines cutting-edge AI models with a synthetic biology data engine, enabling the rapid design of innovative therapeutics that address challenging therapeutic targets.

Absci is a global company headquartered in Vancouver, WA, and maintains offices in New York City, Switzerland, and Serbia. Learn more at or follow us on LinkedIn (@absci), X (@Abscibio), and YouTube.

Our discovery organization runs more experiments than any single internal team can absorb. This role sits at the center of that bottleneck: you receive incoming research requests from program teams, decide with them what should be executed in-house versus outsourced, and then make the outsourced portion happen.

This is not a purely administrative coordination job. You will be triaging technical requests, which means you need enough scientific fluency in early-stage drug discovery to tell the difference between a routine assay run and a method-development project, to recognize when a request is underspecified, and to push back constructively when scope, timeline, and budget don't reconcile. You will also be the primary point of contact with our Chinese CRO partners, therefore fluency in Mandarin to discuss with scientific and business counterpart teams will be required.

Key responsibilities

Intake and triage

· Serve as the single intake point for internal research requests (protein expression and purification, binding and functional assays, developability and biophysical characterization, structural work, in vivo studies, analytical method development, and similar early R&D activities).

· Assess each request against internal technical expertise, instrument and platform availability, and current team capacity, and recommend an internal, external, or hybrid execution path.

· Escalate conflicts in priority to program and functional leadership facilitating the identification of a solution.

CRO sourcing and qualification

· Identify, evaluate, and shortlist CROs in China against technical capability, capacity, quality systems, data integrity practices, IP posture, and cost.

· Build and maintain a qualified vendor list mapped to service categories, so future requests can be routed quickly.

Contracting and compliance groundwork

· Get the paperwork ahead of the science. Drive execution of CDAs/NDAs and Master Service Agreements with prospective and active CROs before SOWs are needed, so program timelines are never gated by contracting.

· Draft, negotiate, and shepherd SOWs, work orders, change orders, and purchase requisitions through Legal, Finance, and Procurement.

Execution oversight and communication

· Act as day-to-day liaison between internal scientists and CRO project teams: kickoff meetings, protocol alignment, progress reviews, and data delivery.

· Conduct meetings, negotiations, and written correspondence with CRO partners in Mandarin; translate and reconcile technical requirements across languages so nothing is lost between the protocol and the bench.

· Report on cycle time, on-time delivery, spent versus budget, and data quality; use those metrics to refine which work goes where.

Qualifications

Required

· BS/MS in a life sciences discipline (biochemistry, molecular biology, biotechnology, immunology, protein science, pharmacology, or related); PhD welcome.

· 5+ years in biotech or pharma with direct exposure to early discovery R&D — enough hands-on or close-adjacent experience to understand assay design, protein reagents, screening cascades, and what makes an experiment fail.

· Demonstrated experience outsourcing research work to CROs, including practical familiarity with the contracting sequence: NDA/CDA → MSA → SOW → change order.

· Professional fluency in Mandarin Chinese (spoken and written) and English. You will negotiate technical and commercial terms in both.

· Strong project management skills and comfort holding a queue of competing priorities without losing detail.

· Excellent judgment about confidentiality and IP; you will handle unpublished data and pre-filing material daily.

Preferred

· Experience specifically with China-based CROs and an existing network among them.

· Background in biologics or antibody discovery (expression, purification, affinity and epitope characterization, developability assessment) or in small-molecule discovery, depending on program mix.

· Willingness to travel nationally and internationally 2–4 times per year for site visits and partner reviews

What success looks like in the first year

· A published, agreed triage process that program teams actually use, with visible queue status and decision rationale.

· A qualified China CRO panel with NDAs and MSAs already executed across the service categories we use most, so a new SOW takes days rather than months.

· Measurable reduction in time from request submission to work start, and in internal scientist time spent on vendor administration.

· Zero contracting or compliance surprises on placed work.

Legal authorization to work in the United States is required. Absci is committed to equal employment opportunity and non-discrimination for all employees and qualified applicants without regard to a person's race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status, or any characteristic protected under applicable law. Any applicant requiring an accommodation in connection with the hiring process and/or to perform the essential functions of the position for which they have applied should make a request to the recruiter or hiring manager, or contact [email protected].