Operations Lead

onepot; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

In-person lab work in SSF

Job summary

onepot is building a hands-on chemistry platform in South San Francisco, automating orders and lab work with AI and robotics. You will own end-to-end customer orders, coordinate lab operations, and drive improvements to the pipeline from quoting to shipping.

The role combines customer-facing coordination with hands-on lab leadership in a fast-moving startup environment. You will oversee order status, blockers, and communication, track inventory and QA data, and lead the lab team, ensuring

Qualifications

• Degree in chemistry or related field; demonstrated ability matters more than the credential.
• Familiarity with chemistry and analytical data; daily reading of chromatograms and structures.
• Experience owning end-to-end projects and leading a small team; ability to manage many threads without dropping them.
• Experience working with data at scale; reconciliations where one wrong row matters.
• Startup/small team background with ownership and limited support is highly relevant.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end customer orders from quote to certificate of analysis and shipment.
• Oversee lab operations to keep runs smooth and continuously improve processes.
• Track orders, inventory, and data; chase down blockers and ensure accurate shipping documents.
• Prepare certificates of analysis and align data in orders and QA records.
• Lead lab staff; manage supplies, reagents, solvents, and consumables.
• Communicate proactively with customers and suppliers; balance product throughput with quality.

Skills

Attention to detail

Communication

Time management

AI tooling

Analytical data

Systems thinking

Curiosity

Automation

Education

Chemistry degree or related field

Tools

SQL

Scripting

Job description

onepot is automating chemistry. Our goal is to enable a self-improvement loop for chemistry by combining AI and advanced robotics. In this loop, AI systems design experiments, robotic systems execute them, and the resulting data improves the next generation of models.

This goal can only be achieved by bringing together people from different backgrounds: ML engineers, chemists, computer scientists, hardware engineers, and the people who make sure the work we promise actually reaches the people who asked for it. We are building a small, unusually ambitious team and are looking for someone who wants complete ownership of how our customer work runs — and of the lab that does it.

Customers send us molecules they need made. We make them, purify them, confirm their identity and purity, and ship them. Between those two points sits a large amount of coordination that has to be exactly right.

The role

This role has two halves. One is customer orders end to end — from an accepted quote to compounds in a box with a certificate of analysis. The other is the lab that does the work: keeping it running smoothly, and steadily improving how it runs.

You will be the person who knows the status of every active order, what is blocking it, and who needs to hear about it. When a customer asks where something is, you answer immediately, because you already know. When something slips, you say so early rather than late.

The work spans quoting, sourcing, analytical review, shipping, and customer communication. You will build and revise customer quotations. You will track what we have ordered through to what is actually on the shelf, and chase down whatever is not moving. You will assemble certificates of analysis and look at the underlying data critically before it leaves the building. You will prepare shipping and customs documentation and make sure every number in it agrees. You will make extensive use of the AI agents and software systems already in place, and design ways of streamlining the process further.

You will also lead the lab team. Lab staff report to you and day-to-day lab operations are yours, including the supplies that keep it running — reagents, solvents, and consumables on the shelf before anyone is waiting on them.

No two days look the same. The role is deliberately not narrowly specified, so your own judgment about what deserves attention today is one of the most valuable things you bring. We are looking for a generalist — someone energized by holding many different kinds of problem at once. Breadth cannot mean surface work, though: when a thread needs real depth, you follow it to the root cause and fix it there.

This is a detail role first and a chemistry role second. You need enough chemistry to read an LC-MS trace, judge whether a purity number is believable, follow a route at a high level, and hold a real conversation with a customer's chemists. You do not need to be able to design the route yourself. If you trained as a researcher and want to move toward work that is more about people, processes, and systems than about running your own experiments, this is a good place to make that move.

We also expect you to understand our systems properly — how orders, inventory, and analytical data actually move through our platform — and to use that understanding to make the whole thing work better. Our processes work well, and in a company moving this fast there is always something worth optimizing. The person in this role should be the one finding those opportunities and acting on them. You will have engineering support and internal tooling to build on, and a strong say in what gets built next.

This is not a business development role — that is covered elsewhere on the team. But you will talk to customers constantly, and you will often be the person they trust most.

Designing how the lab runs

The other half is the lab itself: keep it running smoothly today, make it run better over time. You set what runs when, keep people and materials from becoming bottlenecks, and when something stalls twice you fix the process rather than the symptom.

Education

• We have no fixed requirement. A degree in chemistry or a related field is the most common background for this work, but demonstrated ability matters more than the credential.
• What is not optional is real familiarity with chemistry and analytical data. You will be reading chromatograms and structures on a daily basis.

Experience

• Evidence that you have owned something end to end, where you were the person who would be asked if it went wrong.
• Experience leading a small team, or clear readiness to take it on — lab staff report to this role.
• Experience holding a large number of open threads without dropping any of them.
• Evidence that you can work carefully with data at scale — long lists, cross-referenced records, reconciliations where one wrong row matters.
• Experience in a startup, small team, research group, or other environment where you had significant ownership and limited support is particularly relevant.

Skills

• Exceptional attention to detail. This is the single most important attribute for this role.
• Learns very quickly. You will be handed unfamiliar chemistry, unfamiliar instruments, and unfamiliar systems, often in the same week, and be expected to be useful in each within days.
• Ability to interpret analytical data — LC-MS, chromatograms, purity — and to tell when something looks wrong.
• Fluency with AI agents and modern AI tooling, and a habit of prototyping quickly. We build and use agents heavily across the company, and we expect successful candidates to already work this way.
• A systems mindset. You should want to understand how the whole pipeline fits together, and be able to spot where it is losing time.
• Excellent communication, written and spoken. You will write to customers, suppliers, and colleagues — each needs a different register — and you will present results and defend them live, often to the customer's own chemists.
• Time management and prioritization, for your own work and other people's. Work arrives from every direction at once, and deciding what the lab and the pipeline should do next — and what can wait — matters as much as executing any one thing well.
• Curiosity about chemistry and about how the platform actually works.

Particularly relevant experience

Experience in any of the following would be useful, but we do not expect one person to have all of it:

• International shipping of research materials
• Certificates of analysis, QC documentation, or other customer-facing analytical reporting
• Building internal tools, automations, or agent workflows to replace manual processes
• SQL, scripting, or working directly with operational data
• Purification and analytical chemistry workflows
• Hands‑on organic chemistry, or enough time close to it to read a route and talk credibly to the people running it
• Lab automation — operating, integrating, or troubleshooting automated equipment
• Working directly with customers in a technical or scientific setting
• A time you had to learn something completely new for a role — a domain, an instrument, a system — and got up to speed fast

Who will thrive here

You may be a strong fit if you:

• Are bothered by loose ends, and cannot leave a reconciliation half‑finished
• Are energized rather than discouraged by messy problems, and would rather decide than wait for instructions
• Close your own loops — when a supplier goes quiet or a number does not add up, you find the path forward rather than passing it on unchanged
• Reach for automation before repetition, and would rather build the tool than do the task again
• Want substantial responsibility early, including over how the work gets structured
• Are willing to work outside a narrow job description to make the overall system succeed

Additional requirements

• Ability to work extended hours and weekends as necessary
• onepot works fully in person in our South San Francisco lab
• Ability to work safely in an active chemistry laboratory and around scientific equipment
• Lunches and dinners (if staying late) in office