Founder's Associate

Founder's Associate

LanthaGen Bio is a biotechnology startup developing selective metal-binding and recovery technologies for industrial waste streams, including electronic waste and metallurgical residues.

As our Founder’s Associate, you will work directly with us to support execution across the company’s technical, commercial and operational activities. With a broad view of the business, you will take ownership of cross-functional priorities, coordinate delivery, and build the operational foundations that enable the leadership team to focus on scientific innovation and growth.

The role has four core areas of responsibility:

• Grant-funded R&D delivery: Coordinate project delivery, track milestones and manage reporting across our grant-funded research and development portfolio.
• Commercial strategy and execution: Work closely with the CEO to shape and implement the company’s commercial strategy, assess market opportunities, support customer discovery and partnership development, and translate insights into clear priorities and actionable plans.
• Operations management: Oversee suppliers, purchasing, travel and events to keep day-to-day operations running efficiently.
• Systems and process development: Anticipate the company’s evolving needs and design practical, scalable systems and processes that support its growth.

Salary

£38,000–£42,000 per annum (Year 1); fixed term for 18 months initially, with progression subject to annual project continuation and performance review.

Location

Hybrid; Central Manchester, with hybrid flexibility for planning, reporting and remote work. The role also features regular UK and international travel for conferences, road shows, partner meetings and grant funder events.

Working Hours

Full time: 32 hours Monday-Friday; It is not a compressed-hours role and is designed to support accessible working patterns, increase productivity, and promote work life balance. As this role features international travel, some flexibility to work at weekends for events is required.

Annual Leave

You are entitled to 25 working days paid annual leave per leave year (equivalent to five weeks flexible leave) + paid leave for UK bank holidays on your normal working days + paid leave during the Company’s Christmas closure.

Benefits

• 3 months full pay maternity/paternity/shared parental leave.
• Fully paid volunteer day with local charity.
• Paid leave on your birthday.
• £500 learning and development budget for independent online courses, conference attendance, etc.

What You Will Do

• Act as the right hand to the founders and the operational glue of the company, holding a holistic view of the technical, commercial and operational picture to keep up with the momentum of the company’s growth.
• Build the systems and processes the company needs before it knows it needs them, covering file structures, templates, trackers, onboarding, purchasing, travel and reporting workflows.
• Own the delivery and reporting of LanthaGen's research and development portfolio, translating scientific and commercial strategy set by the C-suite into an integrated plan with clear milestones, deliverables, dependencies, budgets and risks.
• Run the company's reporting rhythm for the leadership team, board, investors, funders and collaborators, including monthly status reports, milestone dashboards, quarterly review packs, and progress and financial reports to funders.
• Run grant financial operations end to end, including invoicing, drawdown scheduling, milestone claims, cost categorisation, timesheet collection, partner sub-contract invoicing and reconciliation against funder budgets
• Own supplier, CRO and consultant onboarding, purchase orders, statements of work and vendor payment cycles, keeping spend tracking against the approved budget
• Take full ownership of end-to-end procurement and financial admin including managing sourcing and placing orders to invoicing, ensuring accurate record-keeping, matching receipts and coordinating timely payments
• Act as the main point of contact for all suppliers, tracking deliveries, resolving order discrepancies
• Coordinate cross-functional delivery across protein engineering, computational chemistry, process chemistry and business development, chairing stand-ups and milestone reviews and unblocking people pragmatically
• Manage the conference and road show calendar end to end, including abstract submissions, booth logistics, collateral production, travel, and post-event follow-up and CRM hygiene
• Build genuine product knowledge across the metal recovery pipeline, including bio-based capture chemistry, downstream products and customer specifications, so that you can speak credibly to the science, the process and the commercial offer, and represent LanthaGen externally.
• Hold the company's operational memory through risk registers, decision logs, action trackers and lessons-learned reviews.

Skills and Attributes

Required from Day 1

• Exceptional organisation and attention to detail. You hold multiple workstreams, deadlines and commitments.
• Demonstrable experience in operations management, with a track record of designing and implementing systems and processes that are proportionate,adopted, and in place before they become a bottleneck
• Excellent planning, prioritisation, documentation and time management, with a pragmatic bias for action.
• Confidence with numbers and spreadsheets. You can build and maintain budgets, cost trackers, interpret cash-flow forecasts and carry out variance analysis in Excel.
• Confidence working independently as the operational owner of multiple concurrent projects, with ownership from planning through delivery, reporting and stakeholder communication
• Experience coordinating external stakeholders including academic partners, CROs, suppliers, consultants and legal advisors, and running the operational side of collaboration agreements
• Strong written and verbal communication, with a track record of producing clear status reports, board packs, funder reports and investor updates, and the confidence to speak credibly to technical, commercial and investor audiences.
• Logistics capability: travel, events, procurement and the practical detail of getting people, samples and materials where they need to be, on time and on budget.
• Practical experience with standard project and operations tooling (for example Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Planner, Asana, Monday, ClickUp or Jira), and comfort standardising tooling across a small team.
• Experience of grant-funded programmes, including grant invoicing, milestone claims, drawdown scheduling and financial reporting to public or philanthropic funders.
• Ability to build deep product knowledge in a technical domain and to translate it into credible, accessible narratives for scientific, commercial and investor audiences.
• Experience with an early-stage startup, a fast-moving research and development environment, or a team that grows quickly around you.

Desirable, Not Essential

• Working knowledge of eligible-cost rules, partner sub-contracting, timesheeting and audit evidence for grant-funded research and development, and comfort liaising with monitoring officers and funder finance teams
• Formal project management accreditation from a recognised institute (APM PMQ or ChPP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, PMI PMP, or equivalent), or an MBA
• A scientific, engineering or other technical background, or a demonstrated ability to get up to speed with technical detail quickly
• Experience presenting to external audiences at conferences, road shows, investor events or funder showcases

Skills Developed in Role

• Broad exposure to how a deep-tech company is built, across science, commercial strategy, fundraising and operations, working directly with the founders.
• Ownership of the operational backbone of a venture-backed, grant-funded biotech, including the full grant lifecycle from bid to close-out across multiple funders in parallel.
• Interaction with protein engineering, computational chemistry and process chemistry teams to translate technical progress into funder-ready and investor-ready narratives.
• Exposure to grant applications, IP filings, technical due diligence, and building the operational case for follow-on funding.
• Ownership of the company's external presence at conferences, road shows and investor events, including collateral, messaging and CRM follow-up.
• Working knowledge of UK and European deep-tech funders, their reporting cycles and their expectations of grant-funded scale-ups.

Experience needed

• 3 or more years in operations, project delivery, chief of staff, founder's associate or programme management roles, ideally in a technical, scientific or research and development setting
• An organisational geek. You build the system, you maintain the system, and you take real satisfaction from things being in order.
• You are comfortable owning budgets, trackers and forecasts, and confident that the numbers are right.
• Travel, events, procurement and partner coordination are handled with ease.
• A strong communicator, in writing and in person, across technical, commercial and investor audiences.
• A PhD scientist with demonstrated industry operations or project management experience will also be considered