Lead Product Owner, Labs of Tomorrow Small Molecule

Own AI-native product delivery for Takeda’s Labs of Tomorrow Small Molecule discovery platform suite. This onsite role in Boston, MA focuses on turning scientific and business intent into an executable technical roadmap, with clear accountability for technical feasibility, delivery quality, and platform integrity.

What you’ll do

• Own and maintain the technical backlog and delivery roadmap for the Small Molecule discovery product family, translating the Business Lead’s vision and prioritized capabilities into epics, user stories, and technically sequenced releases.
• Partner with the Business Lead as a single accountable pair: the Business Lead is accountable for scientific and business value and adoption, while the Technical Product Owner is accountable for technical feasibility, delivery quality, timeline, and platform integrity.
• Work with a team of Product Owners to convert re-imagined AI-native discovery workflows into technical requirements, acceptance criteria, and system designs with architects, engineers, data scientists, and ML scientists.
• Support use case level Scrum Masters across sprint planning, backlog grooming, story writing, and release management to keep work clear, well-specified, and de-risked, with alignment across the product family.
• Make and own technical trade-off decisions (build vs. buy, sequencing, technical debt vs. new capability, integration approach) aligned to Labs of Tomorrow and Business Lead intent and priorities.
• Ensure solutions are grounded in real laboratory and computational chemistry workflows, reflecting how chemists, structural biologists, and computational scientists actually work.
• Own integration and architectural alignment with adjacent platforms including ELN/LIMS, compound registration, HTE, automated synthesis, assay data platforms, and scientific data lakes/data models, in coordination with enterprise architecture and other product teams.
• Manage technical risk, dependencies, and blockers across engineering, data, ML, and infrastructure workstreams, escalating and resolving with DD&T, Computational Science, and external delivery partners as needed.
• Define and track engineering KPIs (velocity, quality, technical adoption/usage telemetry, system performance, reliability) to complement scientific and business value metrics in a shared view of product health.
• Collaborate with external technology/build partners on technical scope, architecture decisions, delivery timelines, and code/solution quality.
• Identify where AI agents, predictive models, automation, and data platform capabilities can be implemented to redesign workflows, and translate those opportunities into feasible, well-architected product features.
• Partner with other Technical Product Owners across the Labs of Tomorrow portfolio to support extensibility, shared components, and consistent technical standards across the suite.

What you bring

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Chemistry, Computational Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Computer Science, Bioinformatics, or a related technical/scientific field.
• 8+ years of progressively responsible experience in software product ownership, technical program management, or engineering leadership, ideally within pharmaceutical, biotech, or life sciences R&D.
• Strong chemistry knowledge with hands-on laboratory experience sufficient to understand medicinal/computational workflows and engage credibly with bench and computational chemists.
• Demonstrated experience as a Technical Product Owner, Product Manager, or similar role owning a backlog and technical roadmap end to end for a software product or platform.
• Solid Agile/Scrum delivery experience including backlog management, story writing and acceptance criteria, sprint planning, release management, and cross-functional ceremonies.
• Hands-on technical background (coding, data engineering, or scientific computing) to participate credibly in design and trade-off discussions across engineering and scientific teams.
• Working knowledge of modern software architecture, cloud, data platforms, and AI/ML system design principles for scientific software.
• Experience translating ambiguous scientific or business requirements into buildable technical specifications.
• Strong stakeholder management, including effective partnership with a Business Lead/Product Lead as a joint leadership pair and management of technical stakeholders across engineering, data science, and infrastructure teams.
• Experience directing external technology/development partners and holding them accountable to scope, timeline, and quality.
• Strong communication skills across scientific stakeholders, business leadership, and technical delivery teams.
• Ability to operate in a complex matrixed environment, influencing without direct authority.

Technologies

• Agile/Scrum
• ELN/LIMS
• HTE
• AI/ML

Benefits

• Equitable pay for all employees
• Strive to be more transparent with pay practices

Compensation and logistics

• Base salary range: USD $177,000 to $278,080 per year
• Location: Boston, MA (onsite)
• Worker type: Employee
• Worker sub-type: Regular
• Time type: Full time
• Job exempt: Yes

Preferred experience

• Experience with scientific software platforms such as ELN/LIMS, compound registration systems, HTE platforms, automated synthesis systems, or assay data platforms.
• Exposure to cheminformatics tools, molecular data standards (e.g., SMILES, SDF, InChI), scientific data models, or AI-ready scientific data practices.
• Experience with AI/ML-enabled discovery applications, including predictive modeling, generative chemistry, or agentic AI workflows.
• Prior experience working in a laboratory automation or digital lab environment.
• Relevant Agile/Scrum product ownership certifications (e.g., CSPO, SAFe POPM).

Takeda is proud in its commitment to creating a diverse workforce and providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, parental status, national origin, age, disability, citizenship status, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, or other protected characteristics, in accordance with applicable law.