Founding Lab Operations Associate

About the Role

Deliverome Bio is a nonprofit startup building an open atlas of surface protein abundance and internalization. We are hiring a founding team to generate data that could expand what targeted therapies can reach. This is a founding operations role in a new BSL-2 laboratory in Cambridge. You will own the lab, taking responsibility for equipment, procurement, inventory, safety, and the systems that keep a small team of scientists running at full speed. You will build most of these systems yourself. This is also a bench role where 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.

Key Responsibilities

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 operational systems: inventory, ordering, receiving, equipment logs, sample and cell line tracking, freezer maps, and continuously improve them.
• Set and enforce standards for shared resources: labeling conventions, stock and aliquot management, expiration and lot tracking, cleanup and reset expectations.
• Onboard new scientists to the lab: training, access, safety, and practical knowledge.

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 apply nonprofit tax exemption correctly.
• Track consumable burn rates and set reorder points.
• Support budget tracking and grant-aware purchasing.

Equipment Ownership

• Own instrument fleet operations: 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 failures.
• Evaluate and specify new equipment as the platform expands.

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.

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 all experiments and flag failures.

Process Improvement and Open Science

• Write SOPs.
• Find and eliminate recurring failure modes.
• Contribute operational protocols and workflow documentation to open releases.

Requirements & Tech Stack

Required

• 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 (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 operational systems more efficient, supported by AI tools.

Qualifications

Who You Are

• Unusually organized, making other people's work easier without being asked.
• Fixes causes, not symptoms, and can tell the difference under time pressure.
• Comfortable owning something with no precedent, preferring to define the standard.
• Knows what the minimum viable version of a system looks like, ships that, and improves it.
• Wants to stay close to the science, preferring a bench day over a status meeting.
• Thrives in a small, high-trust team where contributions are visible and decisions are made fast.

Level and Title

We are hiring at the Senior Research Associate to Laboratory Operations Manager level depending on capability and experience. We prefer candidates with industry startup experience. Demonstrated ownership, hands-on competence at the bench, and the judgment to build systems that hold up as the team grows are most important.

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.