Chief Information Officer

Strawn Arnold & Associates, Ltd. is a retained executive search firm focused in the Life Sciences Industry (www.strawnarnold.com). We have been retained to recruit the Chief Information Officer for JMI Laboratories, based in North Liberty, Iowa.

Interested candidates should state their experience relative to the required and preferred job requirements listed within the role description and must be willing to relocate to JMI Laboratories' headquarters in North Liberty, Iowa.

The Company

JMI Laboratories (www.jmilabs.com) is a global leader in anti-infectives research, operating as a clinical reference microbiology laboratory in support of new antimicrobial drug development, including clinical trials. The company was founded in 2000 by Ronald Jones, M.D. a University of Iowa professor with a long history of working with numerous pharmaceutical companies on antimicrobial development. JMI Laboratories is currently led by CEO Andrew Fuhrmeister, who assumed this role in 2016, while Dr. Jones remains as the company’s Board Chairman.

JMI Laboratories currently offers the following services to prospective and existing clients:

• In Vitro Activity Testing--microbiology and testing assays to characterize the spectrum of activity of a candidate compound, with comparisons to existing therapeutic agents.
• Antimicrobial Surveillance--global monitoring studies to track changes in resistance over time through annual collection of thousands of bacterial and fungal isolates tested against new candidate compounds and marketed antimicrobial agents.
• Molecular Studies Services--Special assays to determine causes of resistance and defining these mechanisms through genetic characterization testing.
• Clinical Trial Support-- perform susceptibility and molecular testing and provide data transfers of test results in support of clinical trials.
• Medical Writing Services--author medical publications (reports / abstracts / posters / manuscripts) for companies to utilize this information in pursuit of new drug applications and / or to publish the testing results to the scientific community.

 The SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program is JMI Laboratories flagship surveillance study that has been ongoing since its establishment in 1997.  It is one of the longest running antimicrobial surveillance programs that monitors worldwide pathogens and the changes in resistance patterns over time through centralized testing and utilizing reference susceptibility methods.

 Visit sentry-mvp.jmilabs.com to view JMI Laboratories’ public data set.

Scope of the Position

The Chief Information Officer will provide vision, leadership, and direction for all information and technology services for the company, both internally and externally facing, to meet organizational and contractual needs in a regulated environment. Contract services to pharmaceutical clients are data driven and this is a pivotal position.

 The company seeks a collaborative and innovative individual that can partner with its scientific leaders to assess laboratory informatics needs. These needs would include custom software applications and instrument interfaces, lab automation and data management and analysis, which includes modern genomics.

This is an on-site, hands-on position in a small company environment and personality traits such as good self-direction, follow-through, critical thinking and problem-solving skills would be very important for the success in this role, as is the ability to operate in both “buy” and “build” environments.  Personal integrity, ability to negotiate and diplomacy skills to work with a diverse team are also essential qualities.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide leadership and strategic direction for IT development and functions for evolving microbiology laboratory, including creation of architecture roadmaps to align with corporate vision.
• Direct development and maintenance of internal and client website reporting and data analysis tools using fullstack software developers and external software developer contractors.
• Planning, implementation and management of all information assets and supporting infrastructure for the purpose of ensuring effective and efficient IT systems.
• Understand the capabilities of commercial laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and incorporate, develop and maintain those systems to meet the laboratory requirements.
• For all technology functions, determine requirements for and demonstrate compliance with all applicable national/regulatory standards or other industry recommended guidance.
• Implement and maintain cloud computing, SaaS and other tech saving solutions.
• Liaise with the other directors and scientists to align technology with strategic business objectives.
• Review and approve system documentation for supported applications, including change control and validation documentation where required.
• Budgeting for all hardware, software, personnel, and contract purchases to meet demands due to continued and sustained company growth.
• Hire, regularly evaluate, and mentor technology staff.
• Directs and prioritizes the efforts of IT staff.
• Lead contingency planning, business continuity management and disaster recovery effort.
• Lead IT training and educational activities.
• Serve as the internal and external customer-facing IT advocate/expert.

Candidate Requirements

Required

• Four-year degree in Computer Science, Engineering or Data Analytics.
• 10+ years of demonstrated knowledge and experience with custom software development with an understanding of full stack development (frontend & backend).
• 5+ years of working in a regulated environment and software development life cycle (SDLC) framework, preferably in a scientific, medical/clinical or pharmaceutical company setting.
• Experience with server hosting and cloud computing.
• Integration and development of APIs to communicate with commercial systems.
• Project management skills.
• Hands-on team leadership and management experience.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, strong presentation skills.

Preferred

• Experience with Ruby on Rails stack development, including PostgreSQL, Redis, Ember.js, React.js.
• Experience with Python development and webtools.
• Experience with next generation sequencing (NGS) or other genetic data (handling molecular data, fasta/fastq files, using BLAST, etc.).
• Experience with AWS (S3, EC2).
• Experience with Virtual machines and/or Docker containers.
• Experience managing and consolidating big data (across SQL databases).
• Experience with integrating visualization or analytical tools (ex: D3.js).
• Experience with laboratory information management systems (LIMS).

Compensation

JMI Laboratories offers a competitive salary and benefits package, which includes health, dental, vacation, 401(k) and profit sharing. Relocation assistance will also be made available, if necessary.

JMI Laboratories is an equal opportunity employer.