Head of Applications - Life Sciences (Ireland)

at  Marama Labs

ABOUT US

Marama Labs is on a mission to become the world’s leading life sciences instrumentation company, aiming to remove bottlenecks in the development and manufacture of next-generation therapeutics with our unique optical analysis technologies.
CloudSpec’s scatter-elimination technology enables us to remove a major bottleneck in the rapidly growing field of nanomedicine, where we can quantify drug load within lipid nanoparticles in a few seconds. Existing techniques take hours and require high analyst touch time. This breakthrough is already taking the nanomedicine field by storm, with the top companies in the world trialling the technology for their workflows.
Marama Labs is now at an exciting juncture, about to open our first European lab facility at our commercial headquarters in Dublin, to expand our presence closer to our target markets and build upon our success to date entering the life sciences industry.
Originally spun-out in New Zealand from the renowned Raman Lab at Victoria University of Wellington, Marama Labs’ founders invented a fundamentally new way to optically analyse cloudy liquids, heralding a new era for UV-Vis spectroscopy. Our flagship “CloudSpec” instrument can directly analyse complex (cloudy) liquids without sample preparation, providing results in a fraction of the time compared to incumbent analytical methods.
Backed by some of the world’s leading VC investors, Marama Labs is a global team with global ambitions; our core team of 13 scientific & software experts in New Zealand are supported by our commercial team in the Northern Hemisphere, together bringing the CloudSpec technology to the life sciences industry.

THE ROLE

We are seeking an exceptional applications specialist to head up our Dublin laboratory and to establish our technologies and products in the nanoparticle analysis market. This role reports to the CCO, with regular support from the CEO (also based in Dublin) and will be responsible for developing workflows, SOPs and best practices, testing user samples, analysing and reporting data and providing guidance to the rest of the team about the needs of life sciences customers. The role is critical as the development team requires expert input to help guide development and the company wants to rapidly grow in this market. You will have already experienced the complexities and rigour required for instruments used in pharma and regulated environments and be very familiar with analytical lab usage and needs.
The ideal candidate will be an expert in analytical processes and instruments for life sciences and biopharma applications and will be familiar with the needs of nanoparticle therapy developments. You will also have a deep appreciation of customer needs across the pharma lifecycle from formulation through to process, manufacturing and QC. You will be experienced and interested in developing and validating robust analytical methods supported by data-driven experimental work. It is expected that the team in Dublin will grow over the next two years, but you will be the first staff member and have a direct role in shaping the direction of the Irish team.
In this exciting role, you will set the tone and direction for the company’s applications and workflow development and be a key enabler for delivering products into this market. Our first product on our development roadmap is due to launch in early 2025 and the successful candidate will contribute to that immediately.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Introduce and lead the applications development team, including setting up a laboratory and best lab practices
• Develop workflows, processes, data, etc., to support the introduction of analytical methods for nanoparticle analysis, e.g. RNA loading quantification of LNPs
• Lend your “voice of the customer” experience to the company
• Help ensure the product meets relevant regulatory needs, e.g., 21 CFR part 11 requirements, EP and USP compliance, etc.
• Support customers in the field and the sales organisation with reports, marketing literature, application notes, conference visits, etc.