VP of Lab Operations

Start Date: October 12 (Flexible) | Location: San Diego (On-site)

About Crop Diagnostix: 

Crop Diagnostix is a high growth, venture-backed Ag Tech startup using genomics and AI to turn plant signals into actionable insights for agriculture. We deploy RNA-based diagnostics that report how crops are responding to their environment, enabling earlier and more precise detection of nutrient needs, disease, stress, and yield risk. 

Job Overview: 

As our VP of Lab Operations, your mission is to build and lead a scalable, high-throughput genomics operation capable of increasing workflow capacity approximately 3x each year while maintaining quality, reliability, turnaround time, and cost discipline.

You will oversee laboratory operations, including sequencing, molecular biology workflows, automation and robotics, procurement, inventory, sample logistics, capacity planning, and team development. You should be technically fluent in molecular biology, next-generation sequencing, and bioinformatics, with a strong understanding of how high-quality genomic data is generated, monitored, and continuously improved. You will mentor our Ops Manager and lab team, continuing to build and scale our high-performing team. 

This is a hands-on leadership role in a rapidly growing startup. We are seeking someone who has previously scaled wet-lab or diagnostic operations. 

Key Responsibilities: 

In your first 30 days, you might: 

• Become familiar with our existing end-to-end workflow, from incoming samples through to final QC. 
• Establish a baseline for current operational performance, including throughput, turnaround time, failure rates, repeat rates, instrument utilization, labor requirements, reagent consumption, and cost per sample. 
• Review existing QC, redundancy, contingency, maintenance, and failure-recovery processes and identify the highest-priority gaps. 
• Review major reagent and equipment vendors, inventory practices, purchasing processes, and existing contracts. 
• Get to know the lab team and assess the organizational structure we will need as the company scales. 

By 60 days, you might: 

• Deliver a detailed operational roadmap for reaching approximately 3x scale, including equipment, robotics, workflow changes, hiring, sequencing capacity, and capital requirements. 
• Identify bottlenecks and operational risks that would prevent the current workflow from scaling. 
• Define the core operational KPIs used to run the laboratory, with clear targets and regular reporting for throughput, turnaround time, assay success, repeat rate, sequencing quality, cost per sample, and equipment utilization. 
• Build an inventory and procurement strategy that balances supply chain resilience with cost and working capital discipline. 

By 90 days, you might: 

• Have the first components of a scaling plan actively implemented, with measurable improvements in capacity, reliability, efficiency, or cost. 
• Establish a flexible staffing structure and hiring plan capable of growing laboratory operations, incorporating temporary staff and expanded evening/night-shift coverage as needed to support increasing throughput and rapid turnaround times. 
• Develop a capacity model that allows us to anticipate when additional instruments, robotics, staff, sequencing capacity, or laboratory space will be required. 
• Have established regular forecasting for sample volume, sequencing requirements, reagents, staffing, equipment utilization, and laboratory capacity. 

Qualifications: 

• 5+ years of experience scaling wet-lab operations through periods of rapid growth, with a particular focus on sequencing, diagnostics, biotechnology, or similarly complex laboratory operations. 
• PhD in molecular biology, genomics, biotechnology, or a related field preferred, but equivalent operational experience is equally valuable. 
• Demonstrated experience in increasing the throughput of a biological workflow while maintaining or improving quality and reliability. Experience building a laboratory or major laboratory workflow from scratch is strongly preferred. 
• Experience designing QC systems, redundancy, contingency plans, and failure-recovery strategies for high-throughput workflows. 
• Experience managing laboratory budgets, inventory, procurement, and vendor negotiations. 
• Experience in lab automation and robotics is preferred. 

Competencies: 

• Scaling & Operational Systems Thinking: You understand that scaling a laboratory is not simply multiplying the existing workflow. You can identify bottlenecks before they become failures, redesign processes as volume increases, and build systems that remain reliable as throughput grows. 
• Startup Execution: You are comfortable operating with incomplete information, limited resources, and rapidly changing priorities. You are willing to execute outside your formal wheelhouse when something is important to the company and can learn unfamiliar areas quickly. 
• Budgeting & Commercial Discipline: You understand that operational excellence includes cost. You can negotiate with major vendors, manage inventory intelligently, plan capital investments, and improve unit economics without compromising reliability. 
• AI-Native: You actively use AI tools to make an organization more effective. You look for opportunities to use AI, software, and automation to improve forecasting, documentation, troubleshooting, analysis, planning, and operational decision-making. 
• Team Building & Mentorship: You strive to build a high-performing team and mentor others. You create clear ownership and growth opportunities, and are comfortable operating in a flat organization where strong ideas come from anyone.

Why Crop Diagnostix: 

• Agriculture moves faster than healthcare regulatory cycles allow. We can iterate and innovate faster, while still holding ourselves to rigorous internal QC and data standards. 
• Direct, high-leverage ownership: own the operations department and work directly with the CSO and CEO, leveraging your experience to make consequential decisions for the company.
• Meaningful equity at an early stage, so you are operating with skin in the game. 
• Proprietary science: the first platform using RNA to detect crop stress weeks before symptoms appear, built on data, models, and IP no one else has. 
• Collaborate with a world-class team of experts across agriculture, biotech, and AI. 

Join us in building the intelligence layer for the largest biological industry in the world, securing our food supply for generations to come.