Product Lead, Biodefense

Radical Numerics, Inc

$130K — $155K *
Aerospace & Defense
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in technical program delivery for US government projects
  • Working fluency in pathogen genomics and biosurveillance
  • Ability to communicate effectively with government scientists and internal teams
  • Hands-on experience in prototype development and testing workflows
  • Experience navigating complex procurement and data authority obstacles
  • Willingness to obtain a US security clearance if necessary

Responsibilities

  • Define which biosurveillance problems to pursue and set technical benchmarks.
  • Identify and cultivate government funding opportunities relevant to biodefense.
  • Design evaluation studies tailored to customer needs and current biosurveillance methodologies.
  • Select appropriate paths to secure funding awards, understanding their nuances.
  • Translate deployment constraints into actionable product specifications.
  • Create prototype models to demonstrate solutions within existing customer processes.
  • Lead the commercial process from negotiation to award, setting pricing and deal structures.

Benefits

  • Opportunity for hands-on involvement in product development and innovation.
  • Direct impact on biodefense solutions and government preparedness.
  • Collaborative work with a leading science team and applications engineers.
  • Potential for career advancement in the growing field of biodefense.
  • Access to work with senior government officials and leading industry partners.
Full Job Description
About the Role

You own product and commercial execution for biodefense. You work out where preparedness money sits across the US government, decide which problems Omnii is ready to solve, and turn technical evaluations into funded deployments.

Our science team owns the core model. You decide what gets built around it: how results enter an existing surveillance pipeline, what evidence a government buyer needs, and how the software must run in the customer's environment. You will have substantial say in the samples, comparators, acceptance criteria, and validations we use.

This is a hands-on role. You will build early prototypes yourself and work alongside an applications engineer who takes them into production. Our Head of Biodefense leads policy, strategy, and senior government relationships. You own the product, the opportunity, and the path to award.

You will carry a commercial target, biased towards long-term, funded programs for Radical with biodefense partners.
What You'll Do
  • Decide which detection and characterization problems we pursue, and set the technical bar Omnii must clear before a customer uses its results on operational samples.
  • Find and develop government opportunities. Determine who holds the requirement, where the funding sits, and what would have to happen for an evaluation to become a program.
  • Design evaluations with the buyer. That will often mean blinded retrospective studies, comparison against the currently fielded pipeline, and performance on the kinds of samples the customer actually handles-such as wastewater, clinical metagenomics, or environmental samples.
  • Choose a viable path to award. OTA consortia, BAAs, small-business programs, subcontracts, and direct awards have different constraints; choosing the wrong one can cost a year.
  • Turn deployment constraints into product requirements. These may include on-premises or disconnected operation, pinned model versions, provenance, auditability, and the evidence required for authorization.
  • Build prototypes that let a customer see how Omnii would work in its existing process, then work with applications engineering to make the successful ones deployable.
  • Own the commercial process through award. You will set pricing and deal structure with the Director of Product and lead negotiations alongside legal.
What We're Looking For
  • You have personally helped win or deliver a technical program for the US government. You have been through an award cycle and understand who owns a requirement, which funding can pay for it, and how a promising pilot gets stranded.
  • You have working fluency in pathogen genomics and biosurveillance. You understand metagenomic sequencing and pathogen-agnostic detection, what a false positive costs an operator at 3am, and why an inferior incumbent tool may still be difficult to replace.
  • You can hold your own with government scientists, turn their technical objections into product decisions, and explain those decisions clearly to our researchers and engineers.
  • You can build an early prototype yourself, enough to test a workflow, interrogate model output, or make a proposed product concrete for a customer.
  • You remain effective when the obstacle is data authority, software authorization, procurement, or an incumbent contract rather than model performance.
  • You are willing and eligible to pursue a US security clearance if the work requires it.
Nice to Have
  • Experience inside a national laboratory, defense or public-health agency, government contractor, or FFRDC.
  • Experience deploying scientific software into disconnected, authorized, or classified environments.
  • Scientific training or substantial professional experience in microbiology, virology, bioinformatics, or public health.
  • Firsthand knowledge of an existing biosurveillance program and where its current workflow fails

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Radical Numerics, Inc

More Aerospace & Defense Jobs

Find similar Product Lead, Biodefense jobs: