First operations hire for a rapidly growing mRNA startup

Come take charge of our operations at HelixNano, a rapidly growing mRNA startup! We’re making our first dedicated ops hire.

We’re a small mRNA startup backed by some of the industry’s top investors (including YCombinator). During the pandemic we solved a few key bottlenecks that kept mRNA limited to just vaccines and we now have the world’s most powerful mRNA platform. The space of mRNA applications has been broken open.

We’re taking on the most urgent problems we can find — moving a COVID vaccine with the highest antibody titers ever reported toward clinic (spearheaded by a Warp Speed colleague), tackling a hugely ambitious climate project, and building a next-generation wave of cancer therapeutics. We’re generating a broad license for our technology, so progress won’t be blocked on what our small team can accomplish.

We’ve been heads down on the science for the last year, but now that projects are heading toward clinic, it’s time to build out some of our internal operations. This is where you come in.

The Role

As our first operations hire, you’ll be the go-to person for anything falling through the cracks — if you’re excited about novelty, good at detailed execution, and have an eye for system-building, you’ll probably thrive in this role. The role will have a good mix of execution and higher-level planning / ownership.

As for what’s already in place:

We have a fantastic lab manager who covers lab operations, and a powerful executive assistant who takes on odd projects while paying special attention to the team culture and environment. Everything else that is required to make a company hum is your domain.

To give you a sense, here are some things that might fall under your wing:

• Accounting & Finances : Manage our accounting and tax consultants. They have the heavy lifting covered, but you’ll keep things moving and (critically!) filter their suggestions to protect the scientists’ time. Standard solutions tend to prioritize neat accounting and fraud prevention over ease of process; we are more risk tolerant than most and often need to design things from first principles.

• Payments and ordering: You’ll handle all the bank wires and vendor payments, and collaborate with the folks in lab to understand what this process should look like long term.

• Hiring/Recruiting: We have a pretty slapdash process, augmented by some external recruiters. This is an area that could use some dedicated attention and design.

• Random projects: spearhead a website redesign, answer investor questions and record requests, research FDA materials, handle benefits & health insurance renewal, etc. You may need to run the occasional wacky project like buying a farm (!).

Each of these is a fledgling area that could be its own role as the company grows. Your job is to execute across these types of domains, deeply learn what matters in each role, and use that knowledge to design processes (and eventually hire out a team) that will let us scale in the next stage of growth.

What we’re looking for

No strict prerequisites - some of the best people we’ve worked with have come from nontraditional paths. Having said that, the strongest candidates will have made operations decisions at a young, growing company where they can see the positive and negative results of those decisions play out over time.

You’ll be working on site in our new snack-filled Seaport office and lab (in Boston, MA), though you don’t need to be in person every day.

Compensation & Benefits

We offer:

• A competitive salary and company equity

• Free premium health insurance, plus an extra $4k each year in a HRA account to cover any any out-of-pocket costs or over the counter drugs

• A people-centric culture; we are driven to build a better world because we love the people in it (not to win capitalism). This starts from within – we trust in and fully support one another in order to do the work that we do.

• 401k with matching, free life & disability insurance, transport benefits, a concerning amount of office snacks, a yearly retreat, etc

• Flexible schedule: a combination of in-person lab work, WFH flexibility, and occasional in-person team meetings, with an emphasis on COVID safety across the board^

• An opportunity to help build a company from the ground floor and make genuine positive impact on solving some of the world’s biggest problems

^ to be explicit about our policies: we all rapid test once a week as baseline, and test more frequently when local cases rise above a set level. We have extra air purifiers running throughout the office; we will buy you one for your desk if the current setup exceeds your comfort level.

Come join us!

If this sounds like you, we’d love to be in touch.

Relocation assistance provided if you’re moving to Boston (lump sum).