Product Manager, Virtual Cell Challenge

About Arc Institute

The Arc Institute is a new scientific institution that conducts curiosity-driven basic science and technology development to understand and treat complex human diseases. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Arc is an independent research organization founded on the belief that many important research programs will be enabled by new institutional models. Arc operates in partnership with Stanford University, UCSF, and UC Berkeley.

While the prevailing university research model has yielded many tremendous successes, we believe in the importance of institutional experimentation as a way to make progress. These include:

• Funding: Arc will fully fund Core Investigator’s (PI’s) research groups, liberating scientists from the typical constraints of project-based external grants.
• Technology: Biomedical research has become increasingly dependent on complex tooling. Arc Technology Centers develop, optimize and deploy rapidly advancing experimental and computational technologies in collaboration with Core Investigators. 
• Support: Arc aims to provide first-class support—operationally, financially and scientifically—that will enable scientists to pursue long-term high risk, high reward research that can meaningfully advance progress in disease cures, including neurodegeneration, cancer, and immune dysfunction.
• Culture: We believe that culture matters enormously in science and that excellence is difficult to sustain. We aim to create a culture that is focused on scientific curiosity, a deep commitment to truth, broad ambition, and selfless collaboration.

Arc has scaled to nearly 200 people. With $650M+ in committed funding and a state of the art new lab facility in Palo Alto, Arc will continue to grow quickly in the coming years.

About the position

In 2025, Arc Institute created the Virtual Cell Challenge (VCC) to accelerate progress in applying machine learning to understand cells in new ways. The competition follows a long history of similar mechanisms that have helped forge new paths in machine learning and science. The VCC has created major traction in its first year, with thousands of participants joining a new community focused on this massive opportunity. Arc plans to run the VCC annually, introducing new datasets and increasingly complex biological objectives each year. We're hiring for a unique role to lead the year-round development and management of the Challenge, working with teams across Arc Institute to design the competition, curate data, engage participants, and measure impact.

About you

• You can lead without authority. You understand how to build relationships and align a team with many different roles around shared goals.
• You love learning new things. This role will require understanding everything from single-cell biology concepts to machine learning evaluation metrics to community management best practices. You don't need to be an expert in all these areas, but you should be excited about learning them and have a track record of diving into new domains.
• No job is too big or too small. In the same day you might be planning next year's competition format with Arc leadership and then troubleshooting a participant's upload issue or answering questions on Discord.

In this position you will

• Develop a clear understanding of competition users and their needs, be the voice of participants in setting vision and strategy for the Challenge
• Coordinate the annual competition across Arc teams: Lead a cross-functional team to select data, build and iterate on the competition design, set rules, grow participation, and tell the VCC story.
• Build and run the competition website: Lead development of the platform with engineering and design teams, managing everything from user registration to final submissions, leaderboards, and data hosting
• Manage the VCC community: Answer technical questions, manage help desk operations, troubleshoot application issues, and facilitate community discussions via Discord and other channels
• Manage competition datasets: Work with experimental teams to generate, quality-check, and package genetic and chemical perturbation data, coordinating staged releases of training, validation, and final test sets
• Plan and execute annual awards: Coordinate strategy and event planning for end of year competition awards, lead vendors to execute on each year’s event
• Work with communications team on announcements: Help set comms strategy, create and publish VCC assets, and track participation and other metrics
• Evolve the competition format each year: Work with Arc leadership to expand to new cell types, add new perturbation types, and scale to more valuable data
• Build partnerships with sponsors and collaborators: Develop relationships with academic institutions, industry partners, and potential sponsors to enhance the challenge's impact and sustainability
• Contribute to other Arc software projects: Apply product management skills to Arc's broader computational biology tools and platforms as new opportunities arise

Requirements

• Bachelors degree or equivalent experience
• Technical background, ie in math, science, or computer science
• Experience as a product manager or program manager working with highly technical teams
• Excellent communication skills
• Exceptional organizational abilities to manage multiple complex workstreams simultaneously
• Strong bias for action and ability to drive results in ambiguous, fast-moving environments

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous exposure to bio AI or computational biology
• Track record of high impact in a fast moving startup environment
• Experience designing user interfaces for technical audiences
• Experience with community management

The base salary range for this position is $165,000-$204,500. These amounts reflect the range of base salary that the Institute reasonably would expect to pay a new hire or internal candidate for this position. The actual base compensation paid to any individual for this position may vary depending on factors such as experience, market conditions, education/training, skill level, and whether the compensation is internally equitable, and does not include bonuses, commissions, differential pay, other forms of compensation, or benefits. This position is also eligible to receive an annual discretionary bonus, with the amount dependent on individual and institute performance factors.