(Senior) Director, Portfolio Strategy, Life Sciences

lilasciences

Cambridge, MA USA · Cambridge

Posted May 26, 2026

Full-time
Corporate Development

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Job description

Your Impact at LILA

Lila Sciences is hiring a Director / Senior Director, New Product Planning to help shape Lila Origins, our company and asset creation arm which partners to translate scientific vision into molecules, materials, and real-world ventures. As a member of a small, highly cross-functional team, you will bring the commercial voice to life sciences opportunities at the earliest stages, assessing where Lila's platform can produce differentiated assets and shaping how those opportunities become ventures, partnerships, or programs.

You will spend your time at the interface of science, market, and deal structure. You will match therapeutic modalities to disease areas based on biological fit, competitive landscape, and commercial viability. You will build quantitative views of opportunities (market sizing, patient population modeling, deal economics) and translate them into recommendations for Origins and Lila leadership. You will pressure-test ideas with external operators, investors, and partners, and use what you learn to sharpen Lila's Origins thesis.

This role suits someone who has run new product planning, asset strategy, or commercial assessment work inside a pharma or biotech organization, lives close to industry trends, and is drawn to a builder environment where the asset list is being defined in real time. You will work closely with the VP, Head of Lila Origins, and sit within Corporate Development. The work is high ambiguity, high leverage, and deliberately cross-disciplinary.

What You'll Be Building

Source and evaluate new life sciences opportunities for Origins, screening for scientific differentiation, commercial viability, and fit with Lila's platform capabilities
Track therapeutic area trends, modality breakthroughs, pipeline movement, and deal activity across pharma and biotech, and translate signal into actionable views for Origins
Match therapeutic modalities to disease areas using biological rationale, competitive landscape, and unmet need, and recommend where Origins should concentrate effort
Build and own market sizing, patient population, and deal economic models that inform go / no-go decisions on candidate ventures and partnerships
Develop target product profiles and early commercial theses for assets under consideration, in partnership with Science, Product, and Corporate Development
Run primary and secondary research (KOL interviews, competitor tracking, payer and clinician landscape) to stress-test assumptions and sharpen recommendations
Shape deal structures and partnership constructs alongside Corporate Development, translating commercial logic into terms that work for Lila and counterparties
Contribute to Origins' strategic thesis by synthesizing what we learn across opportunities into recommendations on therapeutic area focus, modality bets, and partnership models

What You'll Need to Succeed

6-8+ years in new product planning, commercial assessment, asset strategy, or business development inside a pharma, biotech, or life sciences investor (VC, growth equity) setting, with a track record of shaping go / no-go calls on early assets
Strong scientific literacy in life sciences (therapeutics, modalities, disease biology); able to engage substantively with Science and external KOLs and translate scientific nuance into commercial implications
Demonstrated ability to match therapeutic modalities to disease areas, with a clear point of view on where biological fit, unmet need, and competitive landscape converge
Hands-on modeling experience: market sizing, patient population, forecasting, deal economics; comfortable building models from scratch and defending assumptions
Active fluency in industry trends, pipeline movement, and deal activity across pharma and biotech; reads the market without needing a research function to brief you
Strong written and verbal communication; able to distill complex commercial and scientific analyses into crisp recommendations for senior leadership
Comfort operating in high ambiguity with limited oversight; biased toward building structure where none exists

Bonus Points For

Advanced degree in life sciences (PhD, MS in biology, chemistry, bioengineering) or an MBA with deep life sciences focus
Network of biotech operators, VCs, KOLs, and pharma BD leaders that you can tap for diligence and signal
Hands-on use of AI tools in your workflows (market research, competitor tracking, modeling, synthesis) and a clear point of view on how AI is reshaping drug discovery and asset creation
Prior experience structuring or evaluating partnership models, joint ventures, or NewCo formation

Compensation

We offer competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity. Your final offer will reflect your background, expertise, and expected impact.

U.S. Benefits. Full-time U.S. employees receive a comprehensive benefits program including medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off with generous company wide holidays; paid parental leave; an educational assistance program; commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees; and a company subsidized lunch program.

International Benefits. Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.

Expected Base Salary Range

$168,000—$272,000 USD

About LILA

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.

LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.

Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.

We’re All In

Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.

A Note to Agencies

Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.