Manager/Associate Director - Project Management

The opportunity

Relation is offering an outstanding opportunity for an experienced Project Manager to work in close partnership with our Programme and Project Leaders, putting you in a prime position to help shape delivery plans and drive our osteoporosis programme forward.

Working across the full discovery journey, you'll help move the programme through Target ID, Hit-to-Lead, Lead Optimisation, Candidate Selection and beyond — coordinating across the multiple projects that make up the programme, our internal interdisciplinary teams, and third-party partners such as CROs, all while navigating the ambiguity of discovery-stage science with confidence.

You'll operate at programme level, with visibility across every project within the osteoporosis programme, partnering with the Programme Leader and the Project Leaders who own each individual project. If this sounds like you, and you thrive in matrixed environments and want a real hand in shaping how tomorrow's medicines are discovered, come and join us in the heart of London.

Day to day, you will

• Partner with Programme, Project Leaders and sponsors to understand the strategic objectives and delivery requirements across the programme.

• Orchestrate the matrix team to deliver against project objectives, motivating all team members with clear direction and communication.

• Work with functional leads to ensure appropriate resource allocation and to onboard supplementary resources where needed to support delivery.

• Proactively manage plans, budgets, risks and issues across the programme, escalating to senior management when appropriate.

• Support leadership in navigating high-impact, high-risk situations with clear analysis, high transparency and a spirit of partnership — even in the face of significant adversity or major obstacles.

• Translate scientific and strategic objectives into integrated project plans, timelines and milestones.

• Coordinate execution across the wet lab, ML research, data science and engineering teams, owning cross-team dependencies and prioritisation, and actively monitoring interdependencies across teams as the programme evolves.

• Identify and manage risks across the programme, working with team leads to mitigate blockers before they affect delivery.

• Coordinate joint governance bodies (steering committees, working groups, technical committees) — agendas, materials, minutes and follow-ups — and ensure decisions are documented and actioned.

• Communicate status clearly to internal leadership and external partners, surfacing decisions and trade-offs as they arise.

• Maintain project documentation, decision logs and operational hygiene to a standard that supports a multi-year, partnered effort.

• Coordinate resource allocation and operational support across the computational and wet lab teams where required.

• Identify and embed improvements to ways of working as the programme evolves.

Professionally, you will have

• A degree in life sciences, project management, or a related field; advanced degree or equivalent industry experience welcome.

• Significant Programme/Project management experience in biotech, pharma, or comparable scientific R&D settings, ideally including early-stage discovery programmes (target ID through to candidate selection), sufficient to operate as the senior Project manager for a major, multi-year effort.

• Comfort managing a programme where scope and workstreams may evolve significantly as science matures from exploratory biology through to a defined lead series.

• Scientific literacy sufficient to engage credibly with discussions spanning wet lab biology, single-cell omics, and machine learning, and enough grounding in the discovery pipeline (target validation, hit-to-lead, lead optimisation) to track progress and flag risk without needing to do the science yourself.

• Familiarity with stage-gate or portfolio governance frameworks as applied to early discovery programmes (e.g. go/no-go criteria, TPP evolution, milestone-based progression).

• Experience overseeing third-party or outsourced work packages (e.g. CROs, academic collaborators, specialist service providers) — tracking deliverables, timelines, and quality against agreed scope, and escalating issues appropriately.

• Fluency with modern project management methodologies, artifacts and tools (e.g. MS Project, Smartsheet, Asana, Jira; Gantt, RAID logs).

• Strong organisational skills with a record of managing complex, interdependent works treams in matrixed environments. Comfort with the operational realities of R&D projects

• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to write clearly for senior external audiences.

Bonus Experience