What are the responsibilities and job description for the Research Operations Manager position at Episteme?
About Episteme
Episteme is a new kind of R&D company built for people who want their work to matter in the world. We support exceptional researchers pursuing ambitious, translational science; work that often struggles to find the right home within traditional academic or corporate institutions. At Episteme, we provide the financial, infrastructural and operational support that allows researchers to focus on the problems that genuinely deserve their attention. We work closely with them to move ideas from early insight to real-world application. Translation is part of the work, not an afterthought. When breakthroughs are ready, we help bring them into the world responsibly, including through commercialization when appropriate.
Working at Episteme means joining a company that is intentionally different. We are building something new, and that requires comfort with ambiguity, intellectual honesty, and a bias toward thoughtful execution. You will work alongside people from many disciplines who care deeply about rigor, impact and follow-through. We value clarity over complexity, ownership over passivity and collaboration without micromanagement. Roles evolve through contribution and trust rather than rigid job descriptions, and ideas are tested quickly, decisions are made explicitly, and learning is shared openly so the system improves faster than any individual.
What We Look For
Episteme's scientific ambition requires execution that is not only reliable, but structurally durable at scale.
The Research Operations Lead owns and evolves the operational systems that allow multiple research programs to move with clarity, momentum, and accountability, even as complexity increases. You are accountable for ensuring that execution remains stable under pressure, scales across teams without fragmentation, and does not depend on informal heroics or constant coordination overhead. You operate with autonomy across your scope. You balance competing priorities across programs, making deliberate trade-offs between speed, rigor, and resource constraints. When ambiguity increases, you introduce structure where needed while preserving flexibility.
You do not just support execution. You shape how execution happens. You leave systems, programs, and teams more aligned, more predictable, and more resilient than you found them.
What You Will Do
Operational Execution
You will own and continuously evolve the operational rhythm across multiple efforts, ensuring work moves forward with clarity, coordination, and follow-through across teams. You are responsible not only for making progress visible, but for ensuring that execution scales without increasing coordination cost or failure rates.
You will partner closely with researchers and program leads across multiple efforts to ensure operations support scientific progress without friction or duplication. You reduce cognitive load at scale by making coordination predictable, visible, and structurally sound.
You maintain a systemic view of execution health, identifying not only local issues but patterns of failure across teams.
You design and evolve operational systems that scale with the organization. You reduce hidden system flaws, standardize where helpful, and preserve flexibility where necessary.
$120,000—$150,000 USD
Episteme is a new kind of R&D company built for people who want their work to matter in the world. We support exceptional researchers pursuing ambitious, translational science; work that often struggles to find the right home within traditional academic or corporate institutions. At Episteme, we provide the financial, infrastructural and operational support that allows researchers to focus on the problems that genuinely deserve their attention. We work closely with them to move ideas from early insight to real-world application. Translation is part of the work, not an afterthought. When breakthroughs are ready, we help bring them into the world responsibly, including through commercialization when appropriate.
Working at Episteme means joining a company that is intentionally different. We are building something new, and that requires comfort with ambiguity, intellectual honesty, and a bias toward thoughtful execution. You will work alongside people from many disciplines who care deeply about rigor, impact and follow-through. We value clarity over complexity, ownership over passivity and collaboration without micromanagement. Roles evolve through contribution and trust rather than rigid job descriptions, and ideas are tested quickly, decisions are made explicitly, and learning is shared openly so the system improves faster than any individual.
What We Look For
Episteme's scientific ambition requires execution that is not only reliable, but structurally durable at scale.
The Research Operations Lead owns and evolves the operational systems that allow multiple research programs to move with clarity, momentum, and accountability, even as complexity increases. You are accountable for ensuring that execution remains stable under pressure, scales across teams without fragmentation, and does not depend on informal heroics or constant coordination overhead. You operate with autonomy across your scope. You balance competing priorities across programs, making deliberate trade-offs between speed, rigor, and resource constraints. When ambiguity increases, you introduce structure where needed while preserving flexibility.
You do not just support execution. You shape how execution happens. You leave systems, programs, and teams more aligned, more predictable, and more resilient than you found them.
What You Will Do
Operational Execution
You will own and continuously evolve the operational rhythm across multiple efforts, ensuring work moves forward with clarity, coordination, and follow-through across teams. You are responsible not only for making progress visible, but for ensuring that execution scales without increasing coordination cost or failure rates.
- Establish and refine meeting cadence and decision hygiene across teams
- Translate strategy into sequenced, trackable work across multiple programs
- Maintain visibility on milestones, deliverables, and interdependencies
- Ensure clear ownership and reliable closure of action items
- Balance effort and priorities across concurrent initiatives
- Surface stalled or misaligned work early, before it propagates
- Ensure meetings consistently lead to decisions and forward motion
- Communicate execution health across programs, not just within them
- Exercise judgment in prioritization under shifting constraints
You will partner closely with researchers and program leads across multiple efforts to ensure operations support scientific progress without friction or duplication. You reduce cognitive load at scale by making coordination predictable, visible, and structurally sound.
- Maintain budget visibility across programs and identify emerging financial risks
- Coordinate purchasing, vendors, contracts, and renewals across shared needs
- Track resource allocation across programs and anticipate conflicts
- Ensure documentation systems remain coherent and usable as complexity grows
- Align operational timelines across interdependent scientific efforts
- Prevent fragmentation of coordination practices across teams
You maintain a systemic view of execution health, identifying not only local issues but patterns of failure across teams.
- Identify bottlenecks, coordination breakdowns, and recurring failure modes
- Track cross-team dependencies to resolution across multiple programs
- Clarify decision ownership in ambiguous or shared contexts
- Escalate when needed, with clear framing of trade-offs and impact
- Distinguish local variability from systemic risk
- Address root causes rather than repeatedly solving symptoms
You design and evolve operational systems that scale with the organization. You reduce hidden system flaws, standardize where helpful, and preserve flexibility where necessary.
- Design coordination architectures that hold as demand increases
- Clarify and standardize handoffs across teams where needed
- Simplify workflows and eliminate unnecessary operational noise
- Strengthen documentation, visibility, and shared context across programs
- Introduce planning structures that improve sequencing without adding bureaucracy
- Build systems that reduce reliance on individual heroics
- Execution across multiple programs feels coherent, predictable, and resilient. Work moves forward without constant coordination overhead. Dependencies are understood and managed before they become blockers. Teams are aligned without needing excessive synchronization.
- Budgets, purchasing, documentation, and resource allocation scale without creating confusion or duplication. Operational systems hold under pressure and growth. Failure modes are identified early and addressed at the root.
- Researchers are able to focus their energy on scientific reasoning, not coordination complexity.
- If this role were removed, execution would fragment across teams, coordination costs would rise, and hidden risks would begin to accumulate.
- You bring structure to complexity at scale, without making systems rigid. You think in systems, not just tasks. You see how decisions in one area affect others, and act accordingly.
- You are calm under pressure and deliberate in your decisions. You know when to move fast and when to slow down to protect correctness.
- You care deeply about clarity, sequencing, and follow-through, but you are not attached to process for its own sake.
- You operate independently across a broad scope. Your judgment is trusted not only within your domain, but across teams.
- You take ownership of outcomes, not just responsibilities. You improve how work happens, not just whether it gets done.
- You bring meaningful experience in operations, technical program management, or a similar role within a scientific or R&D environment.
- Typically, this includes 8 years of experience supporting complex, multi-program, multi-stakeholder environments where coordination, sequencing, and execution quality are critical.
- You have operated across interconnected systems where decisions in one area materially affect others.
- You have demonstrated ownership of operational systems that multiple teams depend on, including evolving those systems to scale.
- You have experience improving execution not only within a program, but across programs or teams.
- You are comfortable balancing competing priorities and making trade-offs under ambiguity and pressure.
- You are proficient with project management and collaboration tools, and use them to create clarity and alignment across teams, not just local visibility.
- A Bachelor's degree is required; a scientific or technical background is strongly preferred.
- A Project Management certification is also preferred.
- Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO), plus 12 company holidays
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
- 100% company-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, basic life insurance, and AD&D insurance
- 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
- Relocation assistance for qualifying relocations
$120,000—$150,000 USD
Salary : $120,000 - $150,000