Head of Production

We read every application ourselves and reply within a week. TLDR We are building the biological inputs factory that will unlock AI for biology, starting from DNA, the first building block of every biomolecule. Demand for our first DNA product outran our capacity within months of launch, and we are now scaling 10x. As our Head of Production, you will own the factory: every order from the moment it lands to the moment it ships, and the people, processes and numbers that make that happen. You will relaunch production on a 10x larger platform, keep our quality and turnaround promises on every order, and drive our cost per base-pair down every quarter. The best candidate has run a production operation that ships biology to customers, still steps onto the floor when a run is in trouble, is AI-native, and treats every missed ship date as a root cause to find. Your role will evolve with time; you should be excited by that and step up when needed. THIS IS NOT A 9 TO 5. Story and mission The Bessemer process made steel cheap and set off the Second Industrial Revolution. AI is now doing the same to biological design, and cloud labs and robots are doing it to testing. That pushes the bottleneck to the build step: the physical inputs. Every protein and every RNA starts as DNA, and DNA is still expensive. With current suppliers, the DNA to test one therapeutic antibody design costs around $100 per data point; a good antibody needs thousands of them, and a good antibody model needs millions. Abstract Bio is building the factory for those inputs, starting from DNA, the first building block. We brought a DNA product, 4-10x cheaper than incumbents, to market within 6 months of founding the company. With a team of three and word of mouth alone, demand quickly outran our capacity, so we are now building for true scale. This means a 10x larger production platform, adding long and plasmid DNA, and starting the first R&D on RNA and proteins. Building a 10x factory is half the problem. The other half is running it every day: thousands of orders, each on time and each correct, without quality slipping as volume climbs. That is the job of the Head of Production. Our North Star is to be the biological inputs factory that gives scientists any biomolecule, on demand: the missing part of the stack that will unlock AI for biology. We are turning DNA into a commodity, and a commodity wins on cost and reliability. For a customer, reliability means one thing: the right sequence, at the promised quality, on the promised date, every time. The Head of Production owns that promise. You sit at the centre of the factory. Our Head of R&D decides what the factory will make next year; our Head of Automation decides how it gets made at scale; our Lab Manager keeps the lab stocked, calibrated and safe; you run the factory today. You receive methods from R&D and lines from Automation, and you are accountable for what they deliver in production: throughput, yield, first-pass success, turnaround and cost per order. When something goes wrong, you find out why and make sure it does not happen twice. When a shift is short or a batch is at risk, you are on the floor. You are AI-native. Our factory is built so that software can read it and AI agents can act in it. Every order, plate, run and QC result lands in a structured record, and you run production on those records, not on whiteboards and memory. You use AI every day to plan capacity, triage failed orders, flag difficult sequences before they reach the line and write the reports nobody wants to write, and you build or commission the tools that do it. You report to the founders, and as we scale you will hire and lead the production team. This is a company-defining role. We will give you the autonomy to run the factory the way you believe it should run, a budget for the people and systems to do it, and the room to grow into the operations leader of a multi-site biological inputs factory. What you will do Relaunch production at 10x. Own the ramp plan, capacity model, staffing and go-live criteria. Own the order-to-ship loop. Every order has a status, an owner and a promised date, and you know which are at risk before the customer does. Own the numbers. Publish throughput, yield, first-pass success, turnaround and cost per base-pair weekly, and improve them every month. Control the process. Run on SOPs, QC gates and SPC; every failure gets a root cause, and the fix stays fixed. Gatekeep new methods. Nothing from R&D or Automation enters production without your sign-off. Build the AI-native factory. Run on structured data, with tools for capacity planning, failed-order triage and flagging hard sequences at intake. Hire and lead the production team. Build a team of shift leads, operators and QC specialists who are productive in their first week. Be the customer's voice in the factory. Handle escalations with data and turn every complaint into a process change. What you will need to succeed You have run production that ships. You have 5+ years making biological products, 2+ of them leading the operation. You understand the biology. When a batch fails, you can tell a chemistry problem from a process or operator problem. You think in throughput and cost per unit. Capacity models, bottleneck analysis and process control are home turf. You are AI-native. You use AI daily and are comfortable with a LIMS, a dashboard and a query. You lead from the floor. You have run multi-shift teams and can step into a shift without slowing it down. You are obsessively reliable. A late order is an incident. You move fast and stay calm. You run the simple version this week, stay clear when a batch fails the night before it ships, and write things down. Nice-to-haves You have scaled a factory. You have taken a production line from pilot to 10x volume, or brought up a new facility or second site, and you know what breaks on the way. You have lived in a high-throughput service lab. Gene synthesis, oligo, sequencing or CRO operations where every batch is a customer order with a due date, and you know what a good weekly on-time rate looks like. You have run automated lines. You have managed production built on liquid handlers, workcells and schedulers, and you know how to run humans and robots side by side without either waiting on the other. You have shipped product under a quality system. Experience in an ISO 9001, ISO 13485 or similar certified production environment, including batch records, CAPA, customer audits and supplier qualification. You speak operations. Lean, Six Sigma, SPC, an MES or ERP: you have used the toolkit and you know which parts of it a fast-moving startup actually needs. You can multiply yourself. You know shift leads, operators and QC specialists who would follow you to the right opportunity, especially if you are the one sounding the horn. #J-18808-Ljbffr