Director of Commercial Operations

About the role

Apheris enables secure data networks in healthcare and life sciences by safely connecting distributed data for analytics and AI. Our product, the Apheris Compute Gateway, enables AI models to be safely trained and deployed on distributed data.

We have just raised fresh capital and now look to enter our next stage of growth. We are seeking an experienced Director of Commercial Operations to identify, pursue and secure business opportunities within the pharma, biotech and TechBio industries. This role requires a forward-thinking individual with outstanding operational skills and a strong drive to collaborate with both commercial and technical stakeholders (e.g., data science, ML engineering) to generate new business opportunities across a range of use cases (e.g., drug discovery, clinical trials, RWE, clinical tooling). Building on their life sciences data and R&D expertise, the role will own all business development and pre-sales activities, from overseeing outreach and pipeline generation to scoping pilots and contracting.

What you will do

• Business Development: Co-develop and implement business development and sales strategies to grow the company’s presence in targeted pharma, biotech, and TechBio organizations. This includes customizing approaches for each opportunity and proactively identifying prospects to establish or join strategic consortia, such as those supported by initiatives like the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
• Client Engagement: Build and maintain relationships with key executives and stakeholders (incl. R&D executives, ML scientists, legal & compliance stakeholders and procurement) in life sciences, engaging them throughout the sales process.
• Pilot Scoping and Management: Work with field engineering and other internal and external stakeholders to define the scope, objectives, and success criteria of pilot projects. With a customer-first mindset, ensure timely execution by managing resources, aligning expectations, and addressing challenges as they arise to deliver impactful results.
• Procurement Negotiation: Lead discussions with procurement teams to negotiate contracts, terms, and pricing that align with both client needs and company goals. Build trust and ensure mutual understanding while navigating complex procurement processes.
• Overseeing Lead Generation: Identify and pursue new business opportunities regarding the application of federated computing within the pharma, biotech, and TechBio sectors. Oversee one direct report focused on outbound prospecting, including cold outreach and social selling. At the same, take a hands-on role in building pipeline and building supporting collateral together with internal stakeholders.
• Collaboration: Work closely with leadership and internal teams (pre-sales, customer sales engineering, AI programs) to shape commercial outreach and shepherd engagements from initial contact to contract closure.

You should apply if

• You have multiple years of work experience as part of or interacting with life sciences R&D.
• You have a proven track record of selling software, data, or data insights to life sciences companies, particularly in the context of relevant R&D use cases like drug discovery and early-stage drug development. Your experience demonstrates your ability to engage with and deliver value to pharma, biotech, and TechBio customers in these highly specialized areas.
• You understand the dynamics of pharma-to-biotech and pharma-to-site networks and can develop them to better fit use cases. You can identify where AI can create the most impact and what steps are necessary to enable AI-driven solutions on site-specific data.
• You excel in operational excellence and customer operations, consistently bringing structure and clarity to complex processes. You effectively manage multiple moving parts, engage and motivate stakeholders, and adapt your strategies as needed—all while ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
• You have exceptional analytical skills. Apheris is building a complex product at the interface of privacy and security in machine learning, and drug discovery/development. This does not intimidate you as you have previously thrived in settings with complex technical characteristics by translating them into industry- or business-relevant terms.

What we offer you

• Industry-competitive compensation
• Significant early-stage equity
• Remote-first working – work where you work best, whether from home or a co-working space near you
• Great suite of benefits including a wellbeing budget, mental health benefit, a work-from-home budget, a co-working stipend and a learning and development budget
• Regular team lunches and social events
• Generous holiday allowance
• Quarterly All Hands meet-up at our Berlin HQ
• A fun and diverse team of mission-driven individuals with a drive to see AI and ML used for good
• Plenty of room to grow personally and professionally and shape your own role

About Apheris

Apheris enables secure data networks in healthcare and life sciences by safely connecting distributed data for analytics and AI. Our product, the Apheris Compute Gateway, is a federated computing infrastructure with governance, security and privacy controls. Data custodians can add their data to networks while staying in full control. Data scientists can access a larger data cohort and build better models.

Apheris was founded in 2019 after our co-founders built data applications that couldn’t be used as data was distributed across departments and couldn’t be shared or centralized as a result of regulation. From this, they got thinking: what if the data didn’t have to move and instead the computation was sent to the data? Fast-forward to today, Apheris is a platform that empowers businesses to run advanced analytics and machine learning models across organizational and geographical borders in a way that’s secure, private, and governed. By powering their data infrastructure with federated ML and analytics, they can build and operationalize data applications in ways previously not possible.

At Apheris, we’re unified by our mission and the positive impact we can have. We’re excited by the potential we can bring with our federated approach and are looking for the next addition to our commercial team to join us in realizing our mission.

Logistics

Our interview process is structured as follows:

• Initial Screening: If your application matches our requirements, we invite you to an initial video call to get to know us and the role. The interviewer will be interested in your relevant experiences and skills, as well as answer any questions on the company and the role itself that you may have.
• Deep Dive: In this phase, a domain expert from our team will assess your skills and knowledge required for the role by asking you about meaningful experiences or your solutions for specific scenarios in line with the role we are staffing.
• Final Interviews: Finally, we invite you for up to three hours of targeted sessions with our leadership team and your potential future colleagues, talking about the market, our technology, and our culture. As part of this final stage, you will also present a case study that you prepared beforehand.