Director, Strategy & Operations

Recursion; Salt Lake City (UT); Hybrid; USD 192,400 - 255,200; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Equity compensation

Comprehensive benefits package

Job summary

A leading biotech company based in Salt Lake City is looking for a Director of Strategy & Operations to support R&D initiatives. This role requires over 10 years of experience in management consulting and biopharma, along with an advanced degree in a relevant field. The successful candidate will develop strategic frameworks and drive key portfolio decisions alongside executive teams. Excellent analytical, communication, and leadership skills are essential. Competitive compensation includes a salary range of $192,400 to $255,200 plus bonuses and equity.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in management consulting and biopharma.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across functions.
• Deep understanding of drug discovery and development lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Drive portfolio-level strategy ensuring alignment with company goals.
• Develop dashboards and analytics guiding decision-making.
• Provide data-driven insights for portfolio prioritization.

Skills

Strategic thinking

Collaboration

Analytical skills

Leadership

Adaptability

Education

Advanced degree in life sciences or related field

MBA or relevant training

Job description

Your work will change lives. Including your own.

The Impact You’ll Make

Recursion is at the forefront of reimagining drug discovery through the integration of automated cell biology, high‑dimensional data, and sophisticated analytics. As Director, Strategy & Operations, you will play a pivotal role supporting our R&D organization.

This role partners closely with the Executive Director of Strategy & Operations as a trusted right hand, helping drive operational excellence, advancing programs, and tying the Recursion OS directly to program success and portfolio value. The ideal candidate will bring a strong tech/AI experience, strategic thinking, and the ability to execute in a fast‑moving environment.

In Close Partnership With The Executive Director, You Will

• Collaborate with the Global Head of Project Leadership, Executive Director of Strategy and Operations, and cross‑functional stakeholders to drive portfolio‑level strategy, ensuring programs are prioritized and resourced in line with company goals.
• Develop and maintain portfolio frameworks, dashboards, and analytics that integrate technical, scientific, clinical, and commercial insights to guide decision‑making.
• Lead the assessment of Recursion’s Platform differentiation within the biopharma industry, specifically articulating how our AI‑first approach creates superior R&D outcomes.
• Partner in maintaining product specs for our technology and resources to understand the impact of our tools on programs within our portfolio.
• Partner with program leads to ensure consistent tracking of milestones, budgets, and value inflection points across the pipeline and platform builds.
• Provide data‑driven insights and recommendations to inform portfolio reprioritization and scenario planning.
• Contribute to strategic communications for internal and external audiences, highlighting platform differentiation, strategy, and impact.
• Serve as a connector between Platform, Discovery, Clinical, and Finance to align execution with strategic intent.

The Team You’ll Join

You will join Recursion’s Portfolio Strategy team, working closely with the Executive Director of Strategy and Operations and in partnership with our Global Head of Project Leadership. This team is responsible for shaping and steering our R&D portfolio—ensuring that resources, priorities, and decision‑making are aligned with the company’s strategic objectives.

As Director, you will be a close collaborator and right hand to the Executive Director, helping drive clarity and discipline across the portfolio. You’ll play a key role in integrating technical, scientific, clinical, and business insights into actionable portfolio decisions, balancing ambition with focus.

The Portfolio Strategy team partners deeply with program leads in discovery and clinical development, clinical operations, commercial, and finance, creating a unified view of progress and tradeoffs across the pipeline. This is a high‑visibility team at the center of Recursion’s mission, where your analysis, judgment, and leadership will help ensure our most promising programs advance with speed and impact.

The Experience You’ll Need

• Advanced degree in a life sciences, data science or related field preferred; MBA or other relevant training a plus.
• 10+ years of experience, including time in management consulting and the biopharma industry.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across functions and influence without direct authority.
• Deep understanding of the drug discovery and development lifecycle; experience with AI or platform‑based companies is a significant plus.
• Proven track record in managing complex projects, building cross‑functional alignment, and driving execution.
• Excellent analytical, organizational, and communication skills.
• Adaptability, resourcefulness, and comfort operating in a high‑growth, evolving environment.

Working Location & Compensation

Making Salt Lake City or NYC your home base is ideal, however, we will consider remote work for this position. We ask that remote employees commit to regular on‑site visits for routine work and departmental events.

At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is $192,400 to $255,200. You will also be eligible for an annual bonus and equity compensation, as well as a comprehensive benefits package.

The Values We Hope You Share

• We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
• We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect—showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
• We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
• We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
• We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
• We are One Recursion. True cross‑functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.

More About Recursion

Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to radically improve lives. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously generate one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine‑learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world — Recursion is uniting technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montréal, New York, London, Oxford area, and the San Francisco Bay area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation.

Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Recursion Pharmaceuticals and its affiliate companies do not accept resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Recursion or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Recursion’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Recursion, and Recursion will not owe any referral or other fees. Our team will communicate directly with candidates who are not represented by an agent or intermediary unless otherwise agreed to prior to interviewing for the job.