Director, Life Sciences Strategy & Development

ABOUT ABRIDGE Abridge was founded in 2018 with the mission of powering deeper understanding in healthcare. Our AI-powered platform was purpose-built for medical conversations, improving clinical documentation efficiencies while enabling clinicians to focus on what matters most—their patients. Our enterprise-grade technology transforms patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes in real-time, with deep EMR integrations. Powered by Linked Evidence and our purpose-built, auditable AI, we are the only company that maps AI-generated summaries to ground truth, helping providers quickly trust and verify the output. As pioneers in generative AI for healthcare, we are setting the industry standards for the responsible deployment of AI across health systems. We are a growing team of practicing MDs, AI scientists, PhDs, creatives, technologists, and engineers working together to empower people and make care make more sense. We have offices located in the Mission District in San Francisco, the SoHo neighborhood of New York, and East Liberty in Pittsburgh. The Role This is a zero-to-one role. You’ll be the first strategy and development lead for our life sciences business, responsible for figuring out which use cases are worth pursuing, what value the products will drive, and how to structure the first deals. You’ll work directly with Abridge’s product, strategy, clinical, and commercial teams. The right person has done life sciences business development and partnerships before – they’ve sat across the table from pharma executives, structured complex deals, and shaped what their company built based on what the market actually wanted. What You’ll Do - Shape the life sciences strategy. Identify the highest-value use cases, prioritize them, and shape what Abridge brings to market first. - Gather market intelligence from life sciences prospects, existing health system customers, and industry trends to inform product priorities. - Lead discovery with pharma partners. Sit with executives across commercial, medical affairs, R&D, and market access. Understand their workflows, data needs, buying processes, and willingness to pay. - Build and manage the partner pipeline, cultivating relationships and target accounts across pharma. Leverage Abridge’s scale and network to open doors. - Own deals from first conversation to signed contract. Negotiate NDAs, MSAs, SOWs, and data use agreements. Structure pilots with clear scope and success criteria. - Navigate data, compliance, and trust constraints. Work with legal, clinical, and product to understand what we can sell, under what conditions, and how to structure agreements that protect clinician trust. - Execute 0-to-1 product launches with customers, collaborating internally and externally to ensure ease of launch. What You Bring - 7+ years in life sciences BD, partnerships, or strategy, with meaningful time spent at a pharma, biotech, or health tech / data company. You’ve been in rooms with pharma executives and you know how those conversations work. - 0-to-1 experience. You’ve shaped something that wasn’t fully defined yet, and helped define it through customer discovery. - Deal track record. You can walk through the mechanics of complex deals you’ve personally owned – stakeholders, key terms, inflection points. You’ve negotiated NDAs, MSAs, and SOWs yourself. - Pharma fluency. You can seamlessly map a pharma buying process across commercial, medical affairs, R&D, market access. - Comfort with ambiguity. You’re good at running discovery, forming hypotheses, and updating quickly when you’re wrong. - Strong collaborator. You share what you learn, surface problems early, and don’t run ahead of the group. - Clear, direct communication. You write and speak well. You can take something complicated and make it simple without losing precision. Bonus Points - Experience with real-world data, clinical data platforms, or health data partnerships (e.g., Flatiron, Tempus, IQVIA, Symphony). - Rel