The challenge
Making DNA to order has become fast, cheap, and widely available. This is great for medicine, agriculture, and research. But serious risks accompany this progress. We know from red-teaming that if you order fragments of smallpox, Ebola, or 1918 influenza, several providers will ship them to you.
This problem is unusual in being enormously important yet solvable. If we can ensure that a large percentage of the synthetic nucleic acids produced worldwide are screened for hazards — without disrupting the industry or the vital research it supports — we would close off one of the most important pathways available to anyone seeking to cause a deliberate pandemic. The target is clear: within five years, get 80%+ of the world’s DNA providers screening against 99%+ of hazardous sequences, with EU and US mandates plausibly covering a significant portion of the market by the end of 2026.
About SecureDNA & the opportunity
SecureDNA is a nonprofit foundation building free, privacy-preserving screening infrastructure for DNA synthesis — one of the most critical parts of global biosecurity. Our software lets providers screen every order in real time, without exposing their customers’ data or the underlying hazard database. It’s free for standard synthesis providers, and since its launch in 2024 is already one of the most widely used screening systems in the world. Even so, much of global synthesis still goes unscreened — and driving that adoption is the job.
Contingent on making the right hire, the funding is in place to scale SecureDNA into a substantially more ambitious organization — a bigger mandate, more funding, and a larger team. We’re looking for a Managing Director to lead that growth and turn a working platform into global infrastructure.
Our team
We are a small, senior, and globally distributed team that operates with unusual leverage. Each person owns meaningful scope and works directly on the problems that matter, rather than managing layers beneath them. This role is central to keeping it effective as we grow.
The role
As Managing Director, you’ll set strategy, scale the organization, and direct its funding, working closely with our Technical Director and Strategic Partnerships Director. This is a hands-on role, especially in the early days — you’ll build the operating backbone of the organization from scratch. We’re looking for someone genuinely energized by that, ideally with a track record of building in 0-to-1 settings.
Strategy & direction
- Set SecureDNA’s biosecurity direction and domain strategy, leading in close collaboration with the Strategic Partnerships & Client Relationships Director and the council board.
Team & operations
- Build the operating backbone — systems, processes, tooling, and vendor/contractor relationships — that lets a small, distributed team scale. A hands-on role for someone with skin in the game, not a delegation mentality.
- Own hiring and people operations across full-time employees and contractors.
- Manage, mentor, and support existing staff, including the Technical Director and the Strategic Partnerships & Client Relationships Director.
- Own SecureDNA’s long- and short-term financial sustainability, including funding strategy and financial control.
- Administer the Swiss foundation: finance, bookkeeping, annual report and filings, compliance, and entity administration across jurisdictions, with vendor and council support.
Growth & external relationships
- Empower and resource the Strategic Partnerships & Client Relationships Director to build relationships across synthesis providers, integrators, industry bodies, and funders.
- Support policy and government-affairs engagements.
- Drive adoption by unblocking and resourcing customer success and marketing.
Positioning & narrative
- Shape SecureDNA’s external positioning and the story it tells the world.
Who we’re looking for
Above all, an owner rather than an administrator — someone who judges their own success by the bottom line: the prevalence of DNA screening, and a world in which malicious actors have fewer pathways to success. We can’t name a single background that prepares someone for this, so instead we’ve listed signals that might predict fit. No one will have all of them; one or more is a strong sign.
- Built and led a team from scratch.
- Worked with or across different regulatory regimes.
- Operated at the intersection of policy and science.
- Built a standard, coalition, or shared resource that independent — even competing — organizations chose to adopt.
- Enough scientific fluency to go deep on the substance yourself (biosecurity or life-sciences expertise isn’t required, but the ability to engage the science is an advantage).
- Been a credible public voice for a cause or company.
- Worked closely with multiple stakeholder types: businesses, industry groups, regulators, and policymakers.