Senior Medical Project Manager (m/f/d)
Company Overview
Mindpeak is a Hamburg-based scale-up at the forefront of AI-driven cancer diagnostics. Our software helps pathologists analyze medical images more efficiently and accurately - already clinically deployed in more than 25 countries. Our vision is to enable personalized and effective treatment for every cancer patient - to truly improve medical care and patient outcomes around the world.
The Role
Mindpeak is a Hamburg-based AI scale-up in cancer diagnostics. This role sits on the precision-medicine side of the business: partnering with pharmaceutical companies on AI-driven biomarker discovery in drug development programs, and with diagnostic and companion-diagnostic (CDx) companies on developing and validating the tests behind targeted treatment decisions.
You are the execution engine for those partnerships. You bridge complex biological science and high-speed data and software delivery, and you take genuine end-to-end ownership of our most important projects. You are an operational architect, not a coordinator: you inherit ambiguity, structure it, decide, and carry it across the finish line. When something goes wrong, you don't make excuses or over-promise to keep the peace. You find the most likely fix, commit to it, and defend the call.
Scope note: This role does not cover deployment or support work for clinical pathology labs. That sits with a separate part of the business.
Why This Role Exists
As our pharma and diagnostic/CDx partnership business scales, we need experienced owners for delivery - including the judgment calls, client negotiations, and trade-off decisions currently landing on the VP's desk. You'll have real autonomy and real accountability from day one, working directly with senior leadership rather than through layers of process.
Outcomes You'll Own
1. Delivery ownership
Take full ownership of delivery on your accounts within your first 3 months - bottlenecks, escalations, and scope questions resolved by you, not routed upward.
Within your first three-months, take over complex in-flight projects and get them to a defensible position: replanned and re-baselined where needed, risks named, client confidence secured, clear path to the next milestone.
Establish a portfolio view of delivery health that leadership can trust without asking for it.
2. Commercial ownership
Own commercial conversations on your accounts: scope changes, pricing, renewals, expansions, with client stakeholders up to VP level.
Identify and personally drive growth within existing accounts, partnering with sales but owning execution yourself. Hold near-total renewal across your accounts after year one, and grow the book by 50% through expansion within them.
3. Developing the team
Bring the 3 Junior PMs to the point where they independently run mid-complexity projects without your involvement in the details.
Be their first line of escalation support.
4. Building the machine
Document and roll out standardized PM playbooks and templates for pharma and CDx delivery.
Introduce automation, including AI tooling, for repetitive PM work: status reporting, onboarding checklists, data collection.
What You'll Do
Project ownership and execution
Lead end-to-end delivery of high-priority pharma and CDx partnership projects as an autonomous problem-solver.
Translate pathology, lab infrastructure, and drug development requirements into execution-ready specifications for engineering and data teams.
Spot red flags (data bottlenecks, regulatory hurdles, resourcing gaps) weeks ahead and put mitigation in place before they surface with the client.
Make resourcing, timeline, and scope trade-off calls yourself, including without complete evidence, and defend them clearly to stakeholders.
Client and stakeholder ownership
Act as the senior counterpart to client stakeholders and as the confident, credible face of Mindpeak alongside your Junior PMs.
Handle difficult conversations about delays, limitations, and feature creep: read the stakeholder, adapt your approach, defuse tension.
Build the internal relationships that let you make unpopular requests across engineering, data science and medical teams when a project needs it.
People leadership
Run status meetings and project reviews with your 3 Junior PMs; coach them on judgment, not just process.
Set and enforce delivery standards across the team's full portfolio.
Process and scalability
Build reusable frameworks, templates, and SOPs so delivery is standardized across clients rather than reinvented per project.
Track team-wide delivery metrics like on-time delivery, client satisfaction, and process efficiency and report on them to leadership.
What You'll Bring
Direct, hands-on ownership of complex client-facing projects in biotech, pharma, or MedTech - proven by results, not tenure. We care about what you've delivered, not how many years it took.
Demonstrated Track Record of Project Turnarounds: Experience stepping into high-risk, mid-flight, or struggling projects and steering them to success.
Science-tech hybrid. A degree in biology, molecular biology, biomedical sciences, medicine, or a related field, with enough depth to credibly translate pathology and molecular biology requirements into engineering specs. A PhD is a plus, not a substitute for the delivery track record above.
Commercial ownership. Evidence of owning commercial decisions with a client and of identifying and closing an expansion opportunity. A formal revenue target is a plus; having done the work without the title also counts.
Direct people-management experience with a team of comparable size.
Judgment under uncertainty. You deconstruct messy situations fast, ask sharp and uncomfortable questions until you reach the root cause, and make confident calls without perfect information. You don't deploy generic frameworks at problems you don't yet understand.
Resilience. You improvise well, absorb pushback without losing composure, and stay effective amid the pace and ambiguity of a scale-up.
Experience improving PM process or tooling, not just operating inside someone else's playbook.
Working language is English. German proficiency is a plus.
Who This Role Is Not For
Checklist managers. People who can track tasks but don't grasp the underlying science or technology well enough to lead the conversation.
Passengers. Anyone who needs a manager to make the resourcing, timeline, or scope call for them.
Conflict-avoiders. Anyone who resolves tension by building extra features or over-delivering rather than finding the right, defensible answer, and anyone whose "difficult conversation" examples are all internal, with no experience negotiating directly with a client.
Pure academics. Anyone who gets lost in scientific detail at the expense of commercial priorities and deadlines.
Why Mindpeak
Our vision is personalized, effective cancer treatment for every patient.
Build foundational AI systems that power both clinical cancer diagnostics and data-driven drug development, and actively shape the future of personalized medicine.
An open, creative environment with flat hierarchies and fast decisions.
A leadership team that invests in continuous development.
A centrally located Hamburg office with a spectacular view over the harbor.
Application Details
Please send us your CV, job references, your salary expectations, and your earliest possible starting date.
Contact: [email protected]
Direct applicants only. We do not work with recruiting agencies for this position.