CTO (Chief Technology Officer) at Cepheid in Sunnyvale, California

Job Description:

Cepheid CTO position will provide scientific and technological expertise to the global Cepheid R&D, Strategic Planning, Medical/Scientific Affairs, and Product Innovation Management organizations. Working with science, technology, and business leaders across Cepheid, the Danaher Dx Platform, and the Danaher Science & Technology community at large, the CTO will use a strong network and knowledge of emerging scientific, technological trends to help identify and execute innovation vectors fueling Cepheid's molecular clinical diagnostic application future portfolio offering.

In alignment with the Cepheid 5+ strategic plan objectives, the Cepheid CTO will identify and synthesize the most promising organic scientific / technological approaches as well as evaluate open innovation / inorganic / early-stage technology investments and M&A opportunities to drive multi-year investment priorities and execution plan recommendations inclusive of staged and time-bound technological evaluation / de-risking investigation plans. Additionally, the CTO will identify talent transformation requirements grounded in Cepheid innovation models and organizational capability assessments to build an industry-leading layered and balanced technological readiness level (TRL) funnel meeting and exceeding Cepheid innovation-based entitlement to future growth.

The CTO, in close collaboration with other senior Cepheid leaders, sets, technical, business, and strategic initiatives/projects for Cepheid's Innovation Core R&D organization. This person leads and manages a global team of direct reports as well as matrixed cross-functional team members to execute innovation and research discovery projects across all areas within Cepheid (chemistry, biologics, systems, software, and consumables, among others).

The CTO is responsible for setting a clear vision and driving strategy to identify and develop cutting-edge technologies and translating new assay concepts, systems, and services to accelerate and advance future product development & business efforts by Cepheid and/or other Danaher Op-Cos. The candidate is able to communicate these visions and strategies and drive them to action both through motivation of the teams and through strong leadership. The ideal candidate shall possess a systems-level thought process for setting strategies and coordinating a large number of technically challenging initiatives across areas such as multiplexing, adjacent detection modalities, sequencing, time-to-result, novel biomarkers, and future systems architectures.

This position is focused on both the internal development of technologies, assays, systems, and services and the assessment and possible acquisition of external technologies. This role plays a critical function in driving collaboration with other Danaher platforms to define and execute on synergistic innovation opportunities. The successful candidate will have extremely strong technical skills across a wide variety of technical and scientific areas in combination with strong organizational, leadership, communication, business, and project management skills.

The candidate will have shown demonstrated experience and result in leading and managing high stake multi-partite collaboration / open innovation programs.

Organization:

• 
  Reports to: Laurent Bellon, SVP Global R&D Cepheid


• 
  Relationships: Close collaboration with key Dx platform and OpCo technology / innovation/ scientific / technological / strategic planning leaders as well as corporate functional leaders. Close coordination with Dx Platform CSOs & CMOs, DHR SVP Strategic Development, Platform BD leaders, Cepheid Strategic Development team and Cepheid President is expected.


• 
  Location: position will be based in Sunnyvale, CA

ESSENTIAL JOB RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Lead development of Cepheid science and technology strategy and support opco, cross-opco and cross-platform execution. Oversees and directs advanced research to create a timely pipeline of NPD ready technology prototypes, keeping a pulse on new technologies, competition, and customer needs to anticipate future new product development needs.


• Formulates current and long-range plans, objectives and policy deployment to develop talent, organization, and best practice strategies to support innovation, quality and time to market.


• Drives the scientific and technical strategy for Cepheid Innovation Core to ensure that fundamental discoveries, the pursuit of new diagnostic approaches, the development or acquisition of new tools/technologies, the invention of new supporting technologies are prioritized and coordinated in a meaningful and synergistic manner.


• Partner with Dx platform and Cepheid scientific senior leadership to identify and close technology gaps and identify investment opportunity in "white space" disruptive technologies.


• Collaborate with the strategic marketing, strategic development, Medical and Scientific Affairs and business development groups to perform voice of customer (VOC) activities to generate, validate, and prioritize innovation ideas and projects.


• Makes fundamental investment decisions within innovation core (internal development) versus buy (merger and acquisition).


• Drives coordination and exchange between multiple global innovation and development sites to harmonize/standardize processes including productivity improvements, Resource to Roadmap allocation and Innovation development at pace. Utilizes current internal DBS business tools and develop new DBS tools & processes for driving early-stage innovation growth to support a continuous improvement mindset.


• Owns Cepheid Innovation, Research, and Development (RDI) quarterly reviews across out global sites in collaboration with the R&D PMO


• Provide executive sponsorship and drive on the annual Cepheid Innovation Challenge Initiative in collaboration with the R&D PMO


• Leads and manages global scientific, engineering, technical and management staff and participates in multifunctional project teams.


• Develops, organizes, and leads the reporting team to both support innovation projects and to contribute to a culture of innovation across Cepheid. Leverage cross op-co resources, technologies, and opportunities to supplement the Innovation Core projects and strategies.


• Participates in M&A and open innovation target identification, drives technical due diligence activities for Cepheid and provide counsel on scientific and innovation opportunities and risks to the Dx platform.


• Lead cultivation of external institutional relationships, collaborations & partnerships and investments for Cepheid to build a pipeline of leading-edge science and technology infectious disease leadership. Being the voice of Cepheid Innovation, represents the operating company with external partners in high stake engagements .


• Provides leadership and communication responsibilities across the company to provide status updates, communicate challenges & successes, and escalate issues and resolutions.


• Accountable for Pipeline Growth Process and talent succession and management through competency assessment and reviews to identify current and future enterprise capability, leadership and succession gaps and the needed actions, programs and processes to address those gaps. Responsible for innovation leaders performance reviews.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS:

Education or Experience (in years):

• Advanced Master's/Doctoral degree with 15+ years of experience in Biology, Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, or a related technical discipline; or, equivalent combination of education and experience

AND

• 10+ years managing people in large organizations


• A minimum of 10 years of direct experience in technical R&D, product development, and/or innovation settings bringing products to market ideally in the medical, diagnostics, healthcare, and/or consumer health spaces


• Strong leader with a track record of identifying, developing and retaining diverse talent

Knowledge and Skills:

• Broad and deep technical knowledge base across engineering systems, software, plastics/consumables, electronics, biologics, computing, and chemistry


• Innovative, out-of-the-box problem solver capable of overcoming challenging and complex problems in a fast-paced environment


• Proven experience building, leading, developing, and managing high performing technical teams


• Accomplished business leader with broad cross-functional acumen in marketing, sales, product development, operations, quality and finance.


• Ability to synthesize large, disparate data sets to establish visionary strategies


• Sharp business acumen with experience as a business unit and/or program leader


• Excellent communication, organization, and project management (incl. budgeting) skills, including the demonstrated ability to communicate and coordinate effectively across multiple functions and employee levels


• Proven critical thinking and decision-making, effective communication, customer focus, business acumen, quality & compliance oriented, risk management skills with a demonstrated ability to lead large complex organizations. Excellent interpersonal, organization, communication and influencing skills


• Is comfortable delving into the scientific / technical detail, yet can elevate and synthesize insights for non-experts to understand


• Proven experience in a design-controlled, quality-systems driven environment including familiarity with FDA and ISO 13485 standards


• Demonstrated understanding of the healthcare technology space and opportunities


• Proven experience in grant/proposal preparation and submission

The salary range for this role is 350000-375000. This is the range that we in good faith believe is the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. This range may be modified in the future.

Join our winning team today. Together, we'll accelerate the real-life impact of tomorrow's science and technology. We partner with customers across the globe to help them solve their most complex challenges, architecting solutions that bring the power of science to life.

For more information, visit

www.danaher.com
.

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