Head of Product, Life Sciences

Elio; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 380,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k plan

Medical, dental & vision

Competitive salary

Job summary

Elio seeks a Head of Product, Life Sciences to own the platform definition and development for the life sciences market. You will guide the assays, validations, and applications, translating customer engagements into repeatable deployments.

You will work with pharmaceutical R&D, biotech, CROs, and academia to shape product decisions and ensure scalable value, balancing science with engineering priorities.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in product management or related scientific partnerships in life sciences.
• Experience defining product requirements and validation plans for scientific instruments.
• Experience selling into pharmaceutical R&D and academic labs.
• Ability to author clear product specifications and decline non-generalizable opportunities.
• Strong written and verbal communication to scientific audiences.
• Willingness to travel for customers, partners, and conferences.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the life sciences product roadmap and prioritize assays and applications.
• Establish evidentiary standards and validation work for each supported application.
• Lead design-partner engagements from evaluation to deployment and generalize learnings.
• Define configurations, protocols, outputs, and performance characteristics for customers.
• Lead customer evaluations, technical presentations and scientific engagement at conferences.

Skills

Roadmap leadership

Biology knowledge

Customer engagement

Technical alignment

Scientific communication

Pharma industry experience

Product specification

Travel willingness

Education

Master's or PhD in Biology/biomedical sciences

Job description

Elio builds sensing for artificial intelligence. Almost every sensor meets the world through fixed optics: one point of view, one modality, set in the hardware before anything is measured, and shaped to produce an image a person can interpret. Elio makes the optics compute on the light itself and reconfigure while the system runs, with artificial intelligence learning how they behave rather than a person calibrating them. The sensor no longer records a fixed view. It explores, directing details to where the information is and returning the representation a model requires.

The same core technology applies to life sciences, semiconductor metrology, robotics, and defense. In life sciences, the approach is designed to allow observation inside living cells without labeling or disturbing them, resolution of phenotypic detail that current imaging averages away, and high-content imaging at screening scale, including on three-dimensional samples such as organoids and tumor models.

Position Overview

Elio is seeking a Head of Product, Life Sciences to own the definition and development of Elio's platform for the life sciences market. The position holds accountability for what Elio builds for this market: the assays and applications the platform supports, the evidence required to validate them, and the transition of early customer engagements into repeatable deployments.

The position is customer-facing but product-accountable. The successful candidate will work directly with pharmaceutical research organizations, biotechnology companies, contract research organizations, and academic institutions, and will translate that engagement into product decisions rather than into requests passed to the engineering organization. A central requirement of the role is distinguishing opportunities that generalize into product capability from those that would consume development capacity without producing reusable value.

Primary Accountabilities

The Head of Product, Life Sciences is accountable for the following outcomes:

Product roadmap. Define and maintain the life sciences product roadmap, including which assays and applications Elio supports and in what sequence. Hold decision responsibility over scope and prioritization, and represent those decisions to customers and internal stakeholders.

Validation and evidence standard. 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.

Design partner conversion. For an agreed set of accounts, own the progression from initial evaluation to operational deployment, and ensure that capability developed in those engagements generalizes to subsequent customers.

Product specification. Define, for each supported application, the configurations, protocols, outputs, and performance characteristics available to the customer, including in cases where no prior specification exists.

Scope

This position holds decision responsibility over the life sciences product roadmap and directs the engineering work allocated to the segment. It does not carry a revenue quota.

Additional Responsibilities

• 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.

Required Qualifications

• 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.

• Elio offers a fast-paced, creative, and inspiring environment with talented teammates, competitive salary and benefits package including 401k plan, medical, dental & vision.

Chance to make a significant impact in the field of advanced sensing and AI.