Ginkgo Bioworks
Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer.
Alliance Manager, Agriculture
About the role
As an Alliance Manager, you will be the primary contact and overall relationship holder for Ginkgo's customers, with responsibility for the success of at least one (and often multiple) major Ginkgo partnerships. Your role sits at the nexus of Ginkgo’s mission and strategy, and as the team member enabling our partners’ success on Ginkgo’s platform, you will be uniquely positioned to create impact both for our partners and for Ginkgo at large.
Alliance Management at Ginkgo is part of the Commercial Operations team, and we are looking to hire motivated candidates across multiple levels: Manager, Associate Director, and Director. Senior Alliance Manager candidates will report directly to the Head of Commercial Operations at Ginkgo, and own the success of Alliance Management across an industry vertical.
As an Alliance Manager, you will have a high impact and varied role, acting as both the account “portfolio manager” who understands the overall customer strategy and advocates for the partner’s needs, and also as the “product manager” who ensures that the scientific direction being driven by the Ginkgo technical team is building towards a commercially successful product for our partner. Since you are the primary interface with our external partners at various levels (from executive leadership to technical teams), you will be in charge of driving the strategy, tactical execution, account growth, and coordination of our diverse partnerships. Success in this role comes with the ability to effectively leverage the full breadth of the Ginkgo platform by coordinating with all of our constituent teams, including finance, creative, legal, commercial, technical, and corporate development.
Please note: This role requires the ability to be onsite at our Boston offices for 3+ days per week, in addition to traveling as necessary.
Responsibilities
Act as the “CEO” of at least one Ginkgo partnership alliance, ensuring its overall success
- Maintain a strong relationship/partnership, through regular discussions and collaborations across all levels of the partner’s organization (from technical to executive)
- Work jointly with partners to identify and scope out new project opportunities where Ginkgo is uniquely positioned to act as a valuable partner
- Collaborate with partners to understand their commercial goals and overall product roadmaps, and ensure that this context is incorporated into Ginkgo’s project scoping and delivery
- Work with Ginkgo technical teams to oversee and track the progress of projects and their execution to ensure high quality and timely deliverables
- Be an excellent communicator, synthesizing complex information from disparate sources into concise and clear narratives, both internally to Ginkgo and externally with other partners - Track project costs and forecast project revenue, owning the overall P&L of the account
- Work with our internal Commercial Operations development team to build and improve systems for enabling customer success
- Manage other members of the Commercial Operations team (level-dependent)
- Travel as necessary
Minimum Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree with a minimum of 3+ years of relevant work experience in partner-facing roles (e.g. business development, management consulting, strategic account management) Level will depend on education and years of experience.
- 2-3 years of biology, chemistry, biotechnology, or other scientific experience required (in business or technical role)
- MBA and/or PhD is a plus
- Exceptional communication and organizational skills
- Ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams and mobilize people across the organization, and to learn quickly and thrive in a fast-paced environment
- Experience managing and coordinating small teams (3 to 7 people) for project execution is a plus
- Strong aptitude for cultivating working relationships at all levels of management, both internally and externally
Preferred Capabilities and Experience
- Working knowledge of the agriculture industry - 2+ years experience in agriculture or knowledge of development pipelines for biologicals in agriculture
About Ginkgo Bioworks
Ginkgo Bioworks is the organism company. We design custom organisms for customers across multiple markets. We build our foundries to scale the process of organism engineering using software and hardware automation. Organism engineers at Ginkgo learn from nature to develop new organisms that replace technology with biology.
Engineering biology isn't easy. It is frustratingly, painfully difficult. It's programming without a debugger, manufacturing without CAD, and construction without cranes. At Ginkgo we are building a team that can build debuggers, write CAD, and operate cranes. We are looking for the best engineers, scientists, and hackers.
