Operations & Capacity Project Manager

Opening

Generare captures the genetic instructions microbes use to produce molecules, expresses them in the laboratory, and tests their biological activity. Doing this once is science. Doing it at scale, reliably, month after month, is what turns it into a platform.

We have raised 25 million to date and built a collection of 14,000 soil samples and 50,000 microbial strains from France. Our discovery engine has produced more than 500 novel scaffolds so far. Within eighteen months, we intend to be producing more than 1,000 a year.

That number is the reason this role exists. Reaching it means new laboratories, more equipment, and a clear view of where our capacity actually goes. Our laboratories and our production capacity will roughly double over the next two years.

We are hiring an Operations & Capacity Project Manager to lead that expansion and to build the instruments it depends on. You will run the laboratory extension project. You will also build the tools and models that tell us what we can produce, at what cost, and where our capacity should go next.

The opportunity

You will join the Operations department, within the Intelligence & Scale-up team, working closely with our production teams, our lab management and our department heads.

The role has two faces. One is project work: taking the needs expressed by the scientific teams and turning them into laboratories that open on time and within budget. The other is analytical: contributing to the process database, the capacity tracking and the projection models that make our production decisions something other than an informed guess.

You will work alongside our data and modelling team, who build and run the platforms this depends on: the process database, the capacity models and the indicator tooling. Your role is to make them say something about the laboratory, and to act on what they say.

You will work close enough to the laboratory floor to see where the constraints sit, and you will build the models that make them visible to everyone else.

This is a role for someone who wants to build the tools they use, not only to fill them in.

What you will build

Laboratories that open on time

- Frame surface and equipment requirements with the department heads, and translate them into plans with our laboratory designer.
- Complete the commissioning of our new laboratories.
- Identify and visit candidate sites for our future full-capacity facility, and maintain the comparison.
- Prepare the site decision on cost, risk and timing, and present the recommendation to the executive committee.
- Plan and run the move: schedule, budget, coordination across teams, continuity of laboratory activity.

A clear view of what we can produce

- Keep our process database current and trustworthy across capacity, cycle times, yields and costs. The platform is built and maintained by our data team; what it contains, and whether it reflects what actually happens at the bench, is yours.
- Monitor available capacity against actual use, and anticipate equipment needs before they become constraints.
- Build the small, fast tools that answer an operational question in days rather than quarters: what a given instrument would buy us, what a capacity choice would cost, where a bottleneck is forming.
- Act as our reference point on COGs: build the costing, keep it current, and explain it to the executive team and to the laboratory alike.
- Manage the equipment base and the approval route for new requests, and keep the associated procedures up to date.
- Anticipate the equipment and space required by transfers from R&D into production.

Models that guide where capacity goes

- Work with our modelling team, who own the projection platforms, to turn them into operational answers: what throughput, by when, with what equipment, space and staffing.
- Bring the reality of the laboratory into those models: what a step actually takes, where the variability sits, which assumptions no longer hold.
- Use them to set activity targets and to inform trade-offs between projects.
- Contribute to defining our capacity and improvement objectives with the production teams, and to breaking them down into concrete workstreams.
- Contribute to tracking them: weekly indicators, variance analysis, corrective plans.
- Report on progress against target, and raise the alert when a gap opens.

What success looks like

The laboratories open when they were meant to, and the teams can work in them on day one.

Capacity is steered rather than observed. The throughput targets we set are the ones we reach, and when one starts to slip, we see it early enough to act on it rather than explain it afterwards.

Beyond that, we should be able to answer three questions : what our real capacity is today, what it costs us to run, and what we can credibly commit to producing next year.

Who we are looking for

You have already taken a project from framing through to delivery, with a budget, a deadline and people who did not report to you. You are now looking for one where the stakes are visible: a site decision presented to the executive committee, a move run against a budget, a cost model the company relies on.

You are equally comfortable spending part of your week on the laboratory floor and the other part in a model. This is not a role for someone who has left the bench behind.

You bring:

- A scientific background and familiarity with a laboratory environment.
- Several years of project experience, typically three to six: holding a schedule and a budget, and moving a subject forward with people who do not report to you.
- The standing to present a recommendation to an executive committee and to defend it under questioning.
- Comfort with numbers: building a projection model, building a unit cost, and recognising a figure that cannot be right.
- An appetite for building the tracking tools rather than only using them.
- The reflex to build a small tool yourself when the question needs an answer this week, and to work with the data team when it needs a platform.
- A presence in the field and an easy working relationship with operational teams.
- Sound judgement under pressure, and the ability to discuss it directly with the executive team.
- Professional French and English.

Typical backgrounds include an engineer in biological engineering or biotechnology who has since spent a few years in production, industrialisation or laboratory operations; three to six years in operations or industrial performance consulting on a scientific foundation; or a quality or production role in a CDMO or pharmaceutical group, looking for more autonomy in a smaller organisation.

Comfort prototyping your own tools, whether through scripts, no-code platforms or vibe-coding, would be useful. Experience with laboratory commissioning, capacity planning or cost of goods modelling would be too. We do not expect you to arrive with all of them.

Why join Generare

You will join at the point where the collection and the platform exist, and the industrial capacity behind them is still being built. The laboratories, and the operational decisions the data supports, are largely yours to shape

You will see your work move from a capacity constraint identified at the bench to a decision taken at the executive committee. Along the way you will develop experience across project management, industrial operations and cost modelling, with scope for broader responsibility as the activity grows.

Location

Based at our laboratory in Paris. The role requires a strong on-site presence (3-4 days/week).