Blackbird - Associate Director, Patient Recruitment & Engagement

This is a high-impact operational leadership role. You will be responsible for the "last mile" of clinical development: ensuring our biotech portfolio companies can find, enroll, and retain diverse patient populations at record speeds. You will primarily consult with and advise companies during planning and enrollment, bringing innovative and curated strategies into implementation on behalf of portfolio companies. You will also have the opportunity to work on internal initiatives, such as building new technologies to solve industry challenges or partnering with the broader firm to identify disease areas with unmet needs for potential drug development.

Key Responsibilities

1. Enrollment Strategy and Optimization

• Portfolio Consultation: Partner with portfolio CEOs and Heads of Clinical Operations to design comprehensive recruitment and retention plans for Phase I-III programs. In some cases, you will serve as the de facto Head of Patient Engagement or Patient Recruitment at a startup biotech company.

• Recruitment Difficulty Analysis: Conduct burden audits of protocols to identify why patients may decline participation or become an attrition risk. Implement protocol design recommendations and logistical solutions.

• Central Recruitment Campaign Implementation: Oversee selection and implementation of recruitment vendors on behalf of portfolio companies. Design, manage, and optimize central recruitment campaigns to efficiently bring well-qualified patient referrals from the community to research sites.

1. Recruitment Technology and Tool Development

• Participant and Site Toolkits: Create and support development of patient-facing recruitment materials, advertisements, and educational resources with a focus on translating highly technical clinical trial components into clear, understandable language.

• Predictive Analytics: Build dashboards that track enrollment velocity across the portfolio, identifying early warning signs of trial stalls before they impact timelines.

• Recruitment and Insights Tools: Ideate on new technologies related to centralized recruitment, tokenization, pre-qualification processes, and mining patient insights.

• The Cutting Edge: Identify what works and what does not in patient recruitment. Be prepared to test new tactics and bring forward innovative ideas to improve the patient experience and enrollment outcomes.

1. Site and Community Enablement

• Site Support Models: Develop participant and site toolkits that empower study coordinators to effectively communicate trial value to their patient populations.

• Advocacy as a Referral Engine: Leverage relationships with Patient Advocacy Groups, in coordination with other team members, to build referral pathways connecting members directly to open trial sites.

• Patient Concierge Services: Evaluate and implement concierge models that manage patient travel, lodging, and expense logistics to minimize participation burden.

Qualifications

Required Experience and Skills

• 7 or more years of experience in clinical trial recruitment and retention, likely within a high-growth biotech, biopharma company, or leading CRO.

• Proven track record of rescuing stalled trials and achieving aggressive enrollment milestones in competitive therapeutic areas.

• Deep familiarity with recruitment technologies, including recruitment platforms, patient registries, and decentralized clinical trial tools.

• Strong experience managing and holding external recruitment agencies and digital marketing vendors accountable.

• Ability to present recruitment strategies to internal teams, senior leadership at portfolio companies, and vendor partners, clearly justifying spend with measurable return on investment tied to time-to-enrollment savings.

• Proficiency with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), generative AI tools, and productivity tools such as Notion and SmartSheet.

Preferred Experience and Skills

• Advanced degree such as MPH, MBA, or MHA preferred but not required.

• Experience supporting difficult-to-recruit studies, particularly early-stage clinical trials through proof-of-concept.

• Direct-to-patient marketing knowledge, including digital recruitment pathways, vendor landscape, pricing models, analytics, and regulatory considerations for online recruitment.

• Experience managing recruitment in global markets including Europe, APAC, and LATAM to support global filings.