Drug Discovery Resource Outsourcing Manager

About the role

Absci is a clinical-stage biotechnology company advancing novel therapeutics using generative AI. Our Integrated Drug Creation™ platform combines cutting-edge AI models with a synthetic biology data engine, enabling the rapid design of innovative therapeutics that address challenging therapeutic targets. Absci is a global company headquartered in Vancouver, WA, and maintains offices in New York City, Switzerland, and Serbia.

This role sits at the center of that bottleneck: you receive incoming research requests from program teams, decide with them what should be executed in-house versus outsourced, and then make the outsourced portion happen. This is not a purely administrative coordination job. You will be triaging technical requests, which means you need enough scientific fluency in early-stage drug discovery to tell the difference between a routine assay run and a method-development project, to recognize when a request is underspecified, and to push back constructively when scope, timeline, and budget don't reconcile. You will also be the primary point of contact with our Chinese CRO partners, therefore fluency in Mandarin to discuss with scientific and business counterpart teams will be required.

What success looks like in the first year: A published, agreed triage process that program teams actually use, with visible queue status and decision rationale. A qualified China CRO panel with NDAs and MSAs already executed across the service categories we use most, so a new SOW takes days rather than months. Measurable reduction in time from request submission to work start, and in internal scientist time spent on vendor administration. Zero contracting or compliance surprises on placed work.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the single intake point for internal research requests (protein expression and purification, binding and functional assays, developability and biophysical characterization, structural work, in vivo studies, analytical method development, and similar early R&D activities).
• Assess each request against internal technical expertise, instrument and platform availability, and current team capacity, and recommend an internal, external, or hybrid execution path.
• Escal