Founding Lab Operations Associate

Deliverome Project; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Deliverome Bio, a nonprofit startup in Cambridge, MA, seeks a founding Lab Operations Manager to own the day-to-day lab functions and build the systems that keep scientists productive. You will oversee procurement, inventory, safety, and equipment, while contributing at bench level as needed.

You will evolve into a leadership role, documenting workflows and open releases, ensuring audit readiness, and coordinating with co-founders to scale operations as the team grows.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in life sciences with wet-lab experience.
• Strong mammalian cell culture and aseptic technique.
• Familiarity with BSL-2 practices and waste handling.
• Experience building a lab inventory or tracking system.
• Excellent documentation habits.

Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day lab operations including inventory, safety, and waste streams.
• Build and maintain lab systems for inventory, ordering, equipment logs, and sample tracking.
• Set standards for labeling, stock management, and lot tracking.
• Onboard new scientists with training, access, safety, and workflows.
• Own procurement end-to-end: quotes, POs, and backorder management.
• Manage vendor relationships and compliant purchasing for nonprofit operation.
• Own instrument fleet: preventive maintenance, service contracts, and calibration.
• Support core platform instruments and alarm/monitoring systems.
• Maintain safety compliance, biosafety registrations, permits, and audit readiness.
• Keep documentation audit-ready and support shipping of biological materials.

Skills

Lab ops management

Inventory tracking

Cell culture

Biosafety experience

Documentation habits

Education

BS in life sciences

MS in biology or related

Tools

LIMS software

Procurement tools

Job description

Deliverome Bio is a nonprofit startup building a first‑of‑its‑kind open atlas of surface protein abundance and internalization. We’re hiring a founding team to generate the data that could expand what targeted therapies can reach.

The Role

You will own the lab that everything else depends on. This is a founding operations role in a new BSL‑2 laboratory in Cambridge: you will take responsibility for equipment, procurement, inventory, safety, and the systems that keep a small team of scientists running at full speed, and you will build most of those systems yourself rather than inheriting them.

It is also a bench role. You will contribute directly to experiments, support cell culture and cryobanking, and help maintain key equipment. This balance will shift over time to a purely lab manager role and is ideal for current wet‑lab scientists looking for a unique opportunity to grow into operational leadership.

Like all of our founding hires, you will have a direct line to the co‑founders and real authority over how the lab works. The workflows you design will be documented and released alongside our protocols, and the operational decisions you make in the first year – how inventory is tracked, how equipment is maintained, how samples are handled – will still be visible in how this organization runs at ten times the size.

Lab operations and infrastructure

• Own day‑to‑day lab function: reagent and consumable availability, waste streams, gas and liquid nitrogen supply, autoclave and water systems, shared bench and cold‑storage organization
• Build and maintain the operational systems the lab runs on – inventory, ordering, receiving, equipment logs, sample and cell line tracking, freezer maps – and improve them continuously rather than tolerating friction
• Set and enforce the standards that make shared resources reliable: labeling conventions, stock and aliquot management, expiration and lot tracking, cleanup and reset expectations
• Onboard new scientists to the lab: training, access, safety, and the practical knowledge of where things are and how they work

Procurement, vendors, and budget

• Run procurement end to end: quotes, purchase orders, capital equipment purchases, receiving and reconciliation, backorder and substitution management
• Manage vendor and distributor relationships, negotiate pricing and standing orders, and applying nonprofit tax exemption correctly
• Track consumable burn rates and set reorder points that avoid both stockouts and freezer archaeology
• Support budget tracking and grant‑aware purchasing in partnership with the co‑founders and bookkeeping

Equipment ownership

• Own the instrument fleet operationally: installation and commissioning coordination, preventive maintenance schedules, service contracts, calibration, field service visits, and downtime escalation
• Support and help maintain core platform instruments – cell sorter, live‑cell imaging, centrifuges, biosafety cabinets, incubators, cryogenic storage, balances
• Build on initial monitoring and alarm coverage systems for freezers, incubators, and cryostorage, and the response plan for when something fails at 2am
• Evaluate and specify new equipment as the platform expands, including used and auction purchases where they make sense

Safety and compliance

• Own lab safety in practice: chemical hygiene, biosafety practice and training, PPE, spill response, hazardous and biological waste manifests, oxygen monitoring where cryogens are in use
• Support institutional biosafety and municipal registration requirements, permit renewals, and inspection readiness
• Manage shipping and receipt of biological materials, including dry ice and regulated shipments, and support material transfer agreement logistics
• Keep documentation audit‑ready before an audit is scheduled

Experimental contribution

• Execute mammalian cell culture, cryobanking, and routine cell line maintenance and lentivirus preps, including authentication and mycoplasma testing
• Support occasional platform experiments hands‑on
• Prepare and QC common reagents, media, and buffers to a consistent standard
• Generate clean records for everything you run, and flag what didn’t work as clearly as what did

Process improvement and open science

• Write SOPs that someone else can follow without asking you a question
• Find and eliminate recurring failure modes rather than absorbing them; treat repeated firefighting as a design problem
• Contribute operational protocols and workflow documentation to our open releases, so other groups can stand up equivalent capability

What We Are Looking For

• BS or MS in a life science field, with substantial hands‑on wet‑lab experience
• Strong mammalian cell culture and aseptic technique
• Working knowledge of BSL‑2 practices, chemical hygiene, and biological and chemical waste handling
• Experience building or seriously maintaining an inventory or tracking system, and the instinct to systematize processes
• Excellent documentation habits and comfort being the person others rely on to know the answer

Highly valued

• New lab buildout or startup experience, including installations, permitting, and standing up systems from nothing
• Experience with institutional or municipal biosafety registration, hazardous waste programs, or lab inspection processes
• Practical procurement experience: vendors, quotes, POs, receiving, service contracts, and the persistence to chase a critical backordered item
• Cell sorter experience (Sony MA900 or similar), live‑cell imaging platforms (Incucyte), or mass spectrometry (we are acquiring an Evosep LC and Astral Zoom)
• Liquid nitrogen cryostorage management and cryobanking at scale
• Regulated shipping of biological materials (dry ice, Category B) and MTA logistics
• BSL2+ experience with lentivirus production and transduction
• Experience with or interest in light scripting or automation — Apps Script, Python, or comparable — to make the operational systems do more of the work, supported by AI tools

Who You Are

• You are unusually organized, and you make other people's work easier without being asked
• You fix causes, not symptoms, and you can tell the difference under time pressure
• You are comfortable owning something with no precedent, and you'd rather define the standard than wait for one
• You know what the minimum viable version of a system looks like, ship that, and improve it once it's in use
• You want to stay close to the science, and you'd take a bench day over a status meeting
• You thrive in a small, high‑trust team where everyone's contributions are visible and decisions are made fast, and where accelerating science should never be perceived as stepping on toes

Level and Title

We are hiring at the Senior Research Associate to Laboratory Operations Manager level depending on capability and experience, and we prefer candidates with industry startup experience. What matters is demonstrated ownership, hands‑on competence at the bench, and the judgment to build systems that hold up as the team grows.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary benchmarked to industry rates
• Full benefits including health, dental, and retirement
• A founding team role: your decisions will shape the platform and the organization
• Open science by design: your work will be published and used globally
• Unprecedented collaboration with world‑class advisors across proteomics, functional genomics, targeted delivery, and AI
• A culture that values rigor, transparency, and speed, but doesn’t mistake busyness for productivity