Brief Information
• The hiring manager leads the Business Operations portion of our Aesthetics R&D under Portfolio Strategy & Operations.
• Aesthetics R&D in Irvine consists of several functional groups including:
• Medical Affairs
• Biological Research
• Clinical Development
• Portfolio Strategy & Operations
• The hiring manager’s team currently consists of four total resources, including three full-time employees and one contractor.
• This opening is for the current contractor position on the team.
• The current contractor has been supporting the role for approximately one year and is leaving primarily because of the long San Diego-to-Irvine commute.
• The hiring manager stated preference for candidates local to Irvine or candidates who can reliably support the onsite expectations long term without commute-related concerns.
• The role is hybrid and requires onsite attendance Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday each week in Irvine, CA.
• Monday and Friday onsite attendance is generally not required.
• Very occasional optional team-building activities may occur on Mondays or Fridays; however, attendance would be optional and infrequent.
• The contract is expected to run through the end of May 2027.
• Extensions would depend on business need, budget approval, and performance.
Qualifications & Requirements / Skillset
• The role sits specifically within the procurement side of the Business Operations organization.
• The Business Operations team is divided into two primary areas:
• Procurement
• External Engagement
• This role supports service contracting activities for both:
• Clinical Development
• Portfolio Strategy organizations
• The primary responsibility of the role involves supporting service contracts for vendors providing services such as:
• Clinical development consulting
• Project management services
• IT services
• Scientific services
• The role is heavily operational and execution focused.
• The hiring manager emphasized that this is not a purely strategic leadership role and requires someone comfortable working directly within day-to-day operational execution activities.
• Approximately 60–75% of the day-to-day workload consists of service-contract execution and operational support activities.
• The role does not involve directly drafting or legally writing contracts.
• Instead, the role focuses on understanding business needs and translating those needs into procurement contract requests for procurement teams to execute.
• Responsibilities include gathering and communicating information such as:
• Scope-of-work details
• Vendor engagement needs
• Timing expectations
• Business impact
• Data/privacy requirements
• Operational urgency
• The hiring manager emphasized that understanding business operations and business needs is more important than deep procurement-system troubleshooting expertise.
• The team works closely with procurement teams but is not itself part of the procurement organization.
• The Business Operations team functions as an intermediary between business owners and procurement groups.
• The primary customer group supported by the team is Clinical Development.
• Most contract requests involve support for consulting, project-management, scientific, and vendor-service engagements.
• Contract support activity occurs globally, though most activity occurs within the U.S. and UK regions.
• In addition to contract execution responsibilities, the team focuses heavily on continuous-improvement initiatives.
• Continuous-improvement responsibilities include:
• Building relationships with procurement teams
• Understanding procurement processes
• Identifying process bottlenecks and inefficiencies
• Understanding operational challenges and nuances
• Driving cycle-time improvements
• Improving operational efficiencies related to contract turnaround
• The hiring manager emphasized wanting candidates capable of diagnosing operational problems and driving efficiencies in practical business environments.
• Formal Lean/Six Sigma/DMAIC certification or methodology expertise is not required.
• The hiring manager stated that understanding how to drive continuous improvement operationally is more important than specific methodology terminology.
• The role also requires a strong data-analytics and operational-improvement mindset.
• The team tracks operational activity and continuous-improvement initiatives within Smartsheet.
• Power BI is used to visualize operational metrics and performance trends including:
• Contract cycle times
• Vendor trends
• Functional metrics
• Order types
• Operational efficiency trends
• The hiring manager stated preference for candidates with experience using both Smartsheet and Power BI.
• Smartsheet experience is preferred but considered relatively easy to learn.
• Excel experience was described as highly transferable to Smartsheet functionality.
• The hiring manager stated that Power BI is more difficult to learn than Smartsheet.
• Experience with related visualization tools such as Tableau or Spotfire may still translate reasonably well to Power BI exposure.
• The hiring manager clarified that the team is not looking for a Power BI expert-level resource.
• Instead, the ideal candidate should be comfortable navigating Power BI environments and using the platform operationally.
• The hiring manager emphasized that the role requires someone hands-on and execution-focused rather than someone operating primarily at a high-level strategic leadership layer.
• Candidates coming from director-level or highly strategic backgrounds may struggle if they are not willing to return to highly detailed operational execution work.
• The hiring manager stated that the organization already has leadership and strategic direction established and is not seeking someone to redefine organizational strategy.
• Director-level candidates may still potentially align if they are comfortable executing detailed operational work on a day-to-day basis.
• The hiring manager specifically stated that the ideal candidate should be willing to “get their hands dirty” operationally.
• Approximately 10–15% of the role focuses on continuous-improvement activities.
• Remaining bandwidth may support strategic projects aligned to the contractor’s capabilities and prior experience.
• The team currently has several strategic projects requiring ownership support.
• One potential project the contractor may inherit involves upgrading and redesigning the R&D Aesthetics SharePoint site.
• The SharePoint project may involve updates related to:
• Website content
• Navigation structure
• Internal links
• User experience
• The hiring manager estimated the SharePoint work would likely represent approximately a three-month project.
• SharePoint experience is considered an extremely strong nice-to-have capability but is not considered the primary focus of the role.
• The hiring manager stated that business operations and continuous-improvement experience are the two strongest background areas for candidate alignment.
• PMO/project-management backgrounds may also align very well if candidates possess strong operational-execution capability.
• Pharmaceutical/biotech/medical-device industry experience is considered beneficial for navigating a large organization.
• However, the hiring manager stated that strong business operations and procurement-oriented operational experience are considered more important overall than regulated-industry exposure alone.
• Candidates with SAP implementation or software-implementation-heavy backgrounds may not align as strongly unless they also possess stronger procurement/business-operations experience.
• The hiring manager stated preference toward procurement/business-operations-oriented profiles over heavily software-implementation-focused profiles.
• The role also includes identifying opportunities to leverage AI capabilities to improve operational efficiency.
• The hiring manager stated that all team members are expected to begin developing roadmaps around how AI could potentially improve day-to-day operational workflows.
• The role is not expected to immediately implement AI solutions directly.
• Instead, the expectation is to assess current operational workflows, evaluate the AI landscape, and identify potential opportunities to drive efficiencies.
• The hiring manager stated that candidates with experience using AI technologies operationally would align positively with the role.
• Relocation candidates may still be considered if they can reliably support the required hybrid onsite schedule at their own expense.
• The hiring manager clarified that relocation itself is acceptable as long as commute/logistics concerns do not negatively impact long-term attendance or retention expectations.