Associate Director, Corporate Strategy & Business Development (Contract)

Department: Corporate Development & Strategy

Employment Type: Contract

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Description

Role Overview

• Support the design and execution of Kriya's multi-path capital access strategy, including comparable company analysis, sell-side analyst mapping, and investor narrative infrastructure tied to Kriya's core value-creation pillars (manufacturing, data, people) that deliver durable medicines.
• Build and maintain financing scenario and valuation analyses (rNPV analyses, go/no-go decision gates, capital needs by program) that hold up to sophisticated-investor scrutiny.
• Evaluate non-dilutive business development opportunities — outlicensing, partnership, and technical-services / IP-monetization structures — including deal-term benchmarking, structural risk assessment, and comparable-transaction research.
• Support other team members in completion of market intelligence and landscape analysis across relevant indications, modalities, mechanisms, and comparable companies, with explicit sourcing and confidence-level tagging for every claim.
• Support due diligence, data-room preparation, and management presentations for prospective investors, banking partners, and institutional collaborators (e.g., academic medical center partnerships).
• Partner cross-functionally with Finance, BD, Communications, and clinical/program teams to translate scientific and clinical progress into a coherent, evidence-based corporate narrative.
• Apply a consistent data-integrity standard: distinguish sourced fact from internal characterization from hypothesis, and flag discrepancies or gaps explicitly rather than smoothing over them.
• Operate independently against ambiguous, fast-moving priorities typical of a pre-financing clinical-stage biotech, escalating judgment calls rather than defaulting to consensus.

Experience & Skills and Work Environment

• Advanced science degree required (PhD, MS, MD or equivalent; equivalent roles with directly relevant experience will be considered).
• 3 to 5 years in management consulting background (top-tier or boutique strategy/life-sciences consulting) or comparable experience in biotech corporate strategy, corporate development, investment banking, or equity research.
• Demonstrated ability to structure ambiguous problems into clear analytical frameworks, and to build and defend financial or scientific analysis under scrutiny.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to translate complex clinical/scientific material into concise, decision-ready materials for executive and investor audiences.
• Comfort working with primary sources (SEC filings, clinical trial data, scientific literature, company disclosures) and citing them explicitly; discomfort with unsourced or confident-sounding-but-unverified claims.
• Prior exposure to gene therapy, cell therapy, or a related complex biotech modality is a plus; demonstrated ability to ramp quickly in a new scientific area is required.
• Comfortable operating in a lean, resource-constrained, fast-paced environment as a fractional / part-time contributor with the expectation of significant autonomy.
• Strong comfort in leveraging and incorporate large data set analytics and intelligent LLM tools such as Claude into workflows and process.

• Local to San Francisco Bay Area with presence in Palo Alto office at least once a week. 
• Standard office physical demands (extended periods of sitting, computer use).

Life at Kriya