Product Strategy & Partnerships Lead

We're hiring our first Product Strategy & Partnerships Lead — the person who anchors everything we build to what the market truly values. You’ll partner directly with our founders (Cecy & Dom) to own the demand side of our product function: running our voice-of-customer engine, mapping the competitive landscape, and shaping the opportunity bets and deal structures that turn our scientific advantage into commercial traction. This role reports to the CEO and is expected to grow in scope as Biographica scales.

About Us

Safeguarding the future of food Biographica is on a mission to accelerate the development of more productive, sustainable, nutritious, and climate‑resilient food sources. To achieve this, we’re building the leading ML‑driven trait discovery platform for crop gene‑editing — enabling faster, more confident decisions about which genes and edits to pursue, to accelerate the path from genomic insight to novel, high‑value traits in the market. Our computational engine identifies and ranks gene targets for a given crop trait in weeks, and designs precise gene edits to achieve commercially valuable and hard‑to‑determine traits. Today this underpins trait discovery partnerships with leading seed companies, for example BASF | Nunhems. As we expand our in‑house lab capabilities, we’re now validating our designed genetics experimentally, advancing our first internal trait programs to deliver increasingly de‑risked, licensable traits. We recently announced a £7M funding round, backed by world‑class investors, and are building toward Series A.

The role

As Product Strategy & Partnerships Lead, your mandate is to work with the CEO to identify the problems partners care about most — and translate those into clear, deal‑ready opportunities. Biographica operates across two core product streams: a portfolio of licensing‑ready trait programs, and computationally‑designed genetics for customer‑defined trait problems, with an option for experimental validation in select crop/trait areas (delivered through partnerships). In your first year, you will help translate our discovery capabilities into these two streams in practice — ensuring each is clearly scoped, commercially grounded, and supported by strong partner pull — while establishing the product discipline needed to make both repeatable and scalable. You’ll work as a team with our new Product Manager, who converts these bets into roadmaps and delivery.

Responsibilities

• Own the customer discovery engine: lead ongoing partner conversations and discovery interviews across the seed and ag ecosystem, synthesising insights into sharp problem definitions, ICPs, and a ranked opportunity backlog — keeping the company anchored in what the market will actually pay for.
• Build and maintain a living market map: track crops, traits, partner priorities, competitive dynamics, and regulatory/FTO signals by geography and segment, updated continuously as the landscape shifts.
• Develop Outcome Specs for high‑potential opportunities: for each priority bet, define what success looks like in the market — buyer hypothesis, partner acceptance criteria, value range (NPV/royalty logic), deal constraints, and explicit kill criteria.
• Shape deal structures and partnership proposals: develop pricing hypotheses, milestone and royalty logic, proposal narratives, and proof‑pack scaffolding that give the CEO leverage in commercial negotiations — ensuring we don’t undersell or overcommit.
• Recommend where we invest next: provide structured, evidence‑backed recommendations to the CEO on which opportunity areas deserve founder time and product investment, and push back on pursuits that are low‑leverage or misaligned with strategy.
• Integrate market truth into the product system: work closely with the Product Manager to ensure roadmap priorities reflect genuine partner pull, that evidence packages are designed around what partners will accept, and proposals stay anchored to what the team can actually deliver.
• Build the foundations of Biographica's commercial discipline: turn discovery intuition into repeatable processes — interview guides, synthesis templates, opportunity scoring frameworks — that scale as the team grows.

Competencies

We're looking for someone who combines agriculture industry experience with the rigour of a product strategist and commercial instincts and is a builder.

• Ag and seed industry knowledge: Understands how seed companies evaluate, develop, and license traits — including how R&D, commercial, and regulatory functions interact, and what actually drives partner decision‑making. Can speak credibly with breeders, R&D leads, and commercial executives.
• Customer discovery and synthesis: Skilled at running structured partner conversations that surface real needs rather than polite interest, and at converting qualitative signals into sharp, decision‑ready insights.
• Commercial and deal‑shaping intuition: Able to frame value cases in terms partners respond to — NPV ranges, milestone logic, potential royalty structures — and to identify deal structures that preserve Biographica’s long‑term leverage.
• Scientific credibility: Comfortable engaging with computational biology, gene editing, and experimental workflows at a level that earns trust with scientists and enables meaningful feasibility conversations — without needing to run the models.
• Product judgment: Strong instincts for identifying high‑value opportunities, scoping what “good enough to move” looks like, and recognising when signal justifies deeper investment versus when to walk away.
• Structured communication: Produces clear, high‑quality written outputs — opportunity briefs, partner proposals, synthesis documents — that enable fast decisions and reduce CEO bottleneck.
• Mission resonance: Genuine curiosity for life sciences and applied AI in biology, motivation to work on urgent global problems, and the humility to build carefully in a domain where the science is still moving fast.

Background

Experience in product strategy, partnerships, BD, or commercial roles within agbio tech, seed companies, crop science ventures, or adjacent deep‑tech — with a track record of translating complex scientific capabilities into commercial propositions partners engage with seriously. Direct experience navigating seed company or ag industry relationships — understanding how R&D and commercial priorities are set, where decisions get made, and how to build trust with technical and commercial counterparts. Experience shaping early‑stage partnerships, licensing discussions, or co‑development agreements — including structuring value cases and deal terms, not just managing relationships. Scientific or technical background (academic or professional) sufficient to engage credibly with gene editing, computational biology, or experimental crop science workflows. Track record of producing sharp written outputs from ambiguous information — opportunity analyses, market maps, product briefs, partner proposals — that drive decisions rather than just inform them and building systems.

Nice to have:

• Direct experience in trait licensing, trait development programs, or seed company R&D partnerships.
• Exposure to regulatory or FTO considerations in plant biotech (gene editing, precision breeding).
• Experience building discovery or commercial processes from scratch in a startup or spinout context.
• Existing networks among seed companies, globally.

Why join us?

• Own the demand side from day one: As our first commercial product hire, you — alongside the CEO — will define how Biographica engages with the market and selects its opportunities.
• Shape the company's direction: Your recommendations on what to pursue next will directly influence where we invest scientifically and commercially.
• Work at the frontier of AI × biology: Apply breakthroughs in machine learning and gene editing to one of the world's most urgent problems.
• Join a world‑class team: Work with curious, collaborative experts across science, engineering, and operations — and have fun doing it.
• Competitive package: Competitive salary, meaningful equity, private health insurance, and learning & development opportunities.