PopVax is an Indian full-stack biotech building first-in-class and best-in-class vaccines and cancer immunotherapies using machine learning-driven protein design and relentless empiricism. We design, develop, and manufacture our own RNA medicines end-to-end because we believe great pharmaceutical science can only flourish in tight feedback loops that iterate rapidly. PopVax’s experimental work and clinical dose production is based at the RNA Foundry, our integrated R&D and GMP-capable clinical dose production facility in Hyderabad.

PopVax's north star is our goal of developing novel vaccines and therapeutics over the next decade with the cumulative ability to save 1 million lives each year – the Million Lives Mission. To that end, we are developing first-in-class vaccines against Hepatitis C, Strep A, and adult pulmonary TB; broadly-protective best-in-class vaccines against COVID-19, influenza, malaria, and HPV; and precision immunotherapies against hard-to-treat solid tumours such as liver cancer and pancreatic cancer. Beyond existing diseases, we are leveraging our high-speed platform to build rapid-response biosecurity capabilities against engineered de novo pathogens.

Our mission is funded by Vitalik Buterin’s Balvi Fund, the Gates Foundation, the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), Renaissance Philanthropy, and Good Ventures, with individual investments from Enveda founder Viswa Colluru and Tesla self-driving AI pioneer Dhaval Shroff. Our first program, an open-source broadly-protective COVID-19 vaccine, will begin a Phase I clinical trial in Australia in mid-2026. This is just the start – we intend to advance 6+ novel vaccine and immunotherapy programs into human clinical trials over the next three years, decisively demonstrating that world-class biotech R&D is possible in India. 

No matter the job title, each person’s role at PopVax is ultimately about helping bring safe, effective new medicines that represent a step-change over the current standard-of-care to the people who need them, as quickly as possible. If you are looking for a place where the ambition is high, the learning curve is steep, and the work matters to billions, you’ll feel at home here.

If you’re excited by the idea of advancing scientific, clinical, and regulatory frontiers of vaccines and immunotherapies, spending each day developing medicines with the potential to save millions of lives, and building a generational global pharmaceutical company in India along the way – join us!

Role Overview

Let's talk about Soham Sankaran for a moment, because if you take this job, his brain becomes your problem.

Soham grew up in Mumbai, where he built robots and nearly got expelled from both middle school and high school. He went to Yale for undergrad, where he studied computer science and did sociology research at the Yale Institute for Network Science, then moved to Cornell to start a PhD in CS focused on robotics — only to drop out to start a Y Combinator-backed robotics software company called Pashi. Then, during the height of the COVID pandemic, he shut down Pashi, turning down millions in venture capital money, to teach himself immunology and start an RNA vaccine company in India from scratch, with no background in biology whatsoever.

That company is PopVax. Today it is a team of 100+ people, funded by the Gates Foundation, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's Balvi, BARDA, Renaissance Philanthropy, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s Good Ventures, with a broadly-protective COVID-19 vaccine headed to a Phase I clinical trial, and 6 other vaccine and immunotherapy candidates in the preclinical pipeline. Soham also heads the company's machine learning efforts, directs short films on the side with his brother, writes prolifically about science and policy, and occasionally sleeps.

The point of telling you all this is not to impress you. It's to warn you.

Soham operates at high speed across many different domains, from science to robotics to regulatory strategy to software, often in a single day. He travels frequently between Hyderabad, Mumbai, London, San Francisco, and Washington to hire, liaise, and fundraise for PopVax. He generates ideas and plans at a rate that tends to outpace execution capacity, creating a kind of creative chaos that is simultaneously the reason PopVax came into existence and the reason PopVax needs a well-organized Chief of Staff.

That Chief of Staff is you.

What You'll Actually Do

Put simply, your job will be to make PopVax execute at the speed that Soham thinks.

This is not a glorified calendar management role. You will be the person who takes the torrent of ideas, decisions, conversations, and commitments that come out of a given week and turns them into structured plans with clear owners, milestones, and timelines. You will be the institutional memory when things are moving too fast for anyone else to keep track. You will be the person who notices that a critical decision from Tuesday's meeting hasn't been acted on by Thursday, and fixes that before it becomes a problem on Monday.

You will travel with Soham frequently. When he's at J.P. Morgan in San Francisco, you're there. When he's in meetings in Washington, you're there. When he's at the lab in Hyderabad at midnight because something needs to happen before a deadline, you're probably there too. This role requires embracing the chaos — the irregular hours, the flights, the 2 AM phone calls, the sudden pivots. If the idea of a predictable 9-to-5 makes you feel safe, this is not your job. If the idea of being in the room for every important conversation at a frontier biotech company — learning at a pace you didn't think was possible — makes you feel alive, keep reading.

Specifically, you will:

• Own execution, not just coordination. Track and drive progress across projects. Ensure every initiative has clear scope, ownership, milestones, and a realistic timeline. Identify bottlenecks early and resolve them — or escalate fast enough that they get resolved. When Soham makes a commitment in a meeting, you're the one who makes sure it doesn't evaporate into the ether.

• Be the cross-functional connective tissue. R&D, Manufacturing, QA, Operations — these teams all need to be aligned, and requirement changes need to be communicated before they become expensive surprises. You'll be the primary interface that keeps everyone on the same page, even when the page is being rewritten mid-sprint.

• Build the operational infrastructure for speed. Project trackers, status updates, decision logs — you'll build the systems that give leadership a clear, current picture of where things stand without requiring Soham to chase down answers from five different people. The goal is to make the organization's state legible at a glance.

• Prepare communications that tell the truth. Project plans, milestone summaries, execution updates, investor communications — crisp, accurate, and honest about where things actually are, not where we wish they were.

• Support hiring and resourcing. As PopVax scales, you'll help coordinate interviews, track hiring pipelines, onboard new team members, and assist with vendor coordination and resource allocation. The company is growing fast, and the infrastructure for that growth needs someone holding it together.

• Own the problems nobody else owns. Step directly into projects when they need unblocking. Take ownership of ambiguous, cross-cutting problems that don't have an obvious home. Be the person who makes sure nothing important is nobody's job. At a company like PopVax, these orphan problems appear constantly — and they're often the ones that matter most.

What You'll Get

Let's be honest about the deal. The hours will be strange. The travel will be relentless. You will sometimes be exhausted, occasionally exasperated, and frequently operating outside your comfort zone.

In exchange, you will get a seat at every table as PopVax attempts to do something genuinely unprecedented: build a world-class R&D-driven biopharmaceutical company in India at a pace that the pharmaceutical industry has never seen. You will learn about mRNA vaccines, computational protein design, GMP manufacturing, regulatory strategy, fundraising, and business development — not from a textbook, but from being in the room while it happens.

You will work directly with a founder who has built things across robotics, software, and biotech — someone who leads frontier R&D, negotiates with governments, writes code, and co-authors screenplays, sometimes in the same week. The learning curve will be ferocious. If you're the kind of person who wants to compress a decade of professional growth into two or three years, this is how you do it.

Who You Are

You're exceptionally organised, but not rigid. You build systems because they serve the work, not because you love process for its own sake. You're a strong, clear communicator — in writing and in person — who can translate between scientific, technical, and business contexts without losing fidelity in either direction.

You're curious about science and technology. You don't need to be a scientist, but you should genuinely want to understand what teams are building and why. You're comfortable with ambiguity — you don't need a fully formed brief to start moving. And you thrive in environments that most people would find overwhelming.

Most importantly, you're someone who can embrace the chaos — hold many concurrent threads without dropping any, move between strategic thinking and hands-on execution without needing to be asked, and find deep satisfaction in making a brilliant, technically driven team more effective than they would be without you.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in any field. Intellectual horsepower and follow-through matter more than subject area.

• Exceptional organisational skills and the ability to manage multiple complex workstreams simultaneously.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills — you can write a crisp project update and hold your own in a room full of PhD scientists.

• Strong quantitative skills, with a working grasp of statistics and probability.

• Some experience writing code, even if it isn't your primary occupation.

• Willingness to travel frequently and work non-standard hours, including late nights and weekends when the work demands it.

• High tolerance for ambiguity and rapid change.

Preferred (but not required)

• Experience in a startup, high-growth, or founder-adjacent role.

• Exposure to biotech, pharmaceutical, or deep-tech environments.

• Experience with project management tools, operational systems, or data analysis.

• Prior experience working directly with a CEO or senior executive in a fast-paced setting.

Reporting Structure

You'll report directly to Soham Sankaran, Founder & CEO of PopVax. You will be his closest operational partner — in the room for the important conversations, on the plane for the important trips, and on the other end of the phone at whatever hour the next crisis or opportunity arrives. This is a role with extraordinary access, extraordinary learning, and extraordinary demands. If that combination excites you rather than terrifies you, we should talk.