Director, Alliance Management

Role Summary

The Director, Alliance Management will support the management and optimization of Akebia’s strategic commercial alliances with industry partners, requiring strategic relationship management, creative problem solving, and thorough diligence. The role involves working with Program Management, SMEs from various functions, and senior management to support existing global alliances through development to commercialization, and to help kick off new alliances.

Responsibilities

• Ensure that key goals for alliances are achieved, and the relationship remains productive with partners
• Become an internal expert on partner contracts and facilitate contract/partner related questions with appropriate internal stakeholders
• Effectively manage cross-functional governance committees
• Facilitate internal alignment and readiness prior to engaging partners
• Track partnership effectiveness and identify opportunities to improve communication and collaboration
• Effective communications and follow up on action items for alliances Coordinate and prepare meeting agendas, presentations, meeting minutes/actions along with cross-functional stakeholders to ensure successful team meetings and governance committee meetings with partners
• Identify conflicts and issues as they arise and work diligently with relevant stakeholders to formulate a strategy and drive resolution process in a timely manner, escalating, where appropriate
• Build and maintain relationships with Akebia stakeholders from each functional area (i.e. CMC, regulatory, legal, medical affairs, commercial)
• Build expertise about partner companies, including key contacts, company organization/ leadership, supply forecasts, financials and strategic priorities
• Facilitate ancillary agreements and contract amendments with internal stakeholders and partners
• Prepare contractual deliverables such as quarterly reports, development plans, commercial launch plans, in alignment with internal stakeholders (i.e. finance, accounting, commercial)

Qualifications

• Bachelor‚Äôs degree required
• Minimum of 10 years in biopharma and/or industry consulting
• Previous experience in alliance management within the commercial space (licensing, marketing, communications, etc.)
• Experience working directly with commercial partners or third parties and demonstrated interpersonal communication skills with the ability to build and communicate business rationale
• Strong leadership and self-direction, high-capacity for learning quickly
• Experience and comfort working and leading within matrixed organizations
• Excellent PowerPoint and Excel skills

Skills

• Relationship management
• Contract management
• Cross-functional coordination
• Strategic planning
• Communication and presentation
• Problem solving and stakeholder management

Education

• Not specified beyond Bachelor‚Äôs degree; advanced degree may be preferred