Career Opportunities at BioRender

Overview

Thanks for joining us. My name is Emily Bush. I am the Talent Acquisition Manager here at Biorender. So I have the really fun job of meeting people like all of you and helping to grow our amazing team here at BioRender.

So we have really been in hyper growth here on our team if you saw Shiz's keynote yesterday, that I'm sure you saw kind of our origin story and how big we've gotten now is just incredible.

So the team is nearly 80 people today. We've actually more than doubled, much more than doubled just in the last year.

No plans on slowing down that growth. We do plan to at least double again over the next year, probably another hundred plus people that we're gonna be bringing on to the team. And more than half of our team today, so more than half actually does come from a science background. So whether that's undergrad or, you know, even a post doc We've got team members today who are currently working on their PhD and work with us on a part time basis. So of course, that means that with all of these science backgrounds, a lot of us have chosen a bit of a non-traditional path since now we're working in tech and software company. And I feel like these alternative pathways into tech from science are often not quite as well known.

So I'm really excited today to be joined by several of my BioRender colleagues who are each going to share a bit about themselves and their role here at BioRender. And then we're gonna move into breakout rooms.

So each team listed here is going to have their own break out room link. If there's a particular role or a team that you'd like to hear more about or ask questions about, feel free to hop into that specific room at the end.

And I will also be in a breakout room. So if you have more general questions about careers or working at BioRender, definitely feel free to join me in that room.

Business Development/Sales

Now without further ado, let's get into it and meet some of the team. I'm really excited to hand it over to Saba Siddiqui, who's on our sales team, and she's gonna share a bit more about herself and her role in sales at BioRender.

Hi, everyone. It's really nice to meet everyone. Like Emily mentioned, my name is Saba. I am a business development representative here at BioRender, so I am a part of the sales team. In terms of my science background, I completed my bachelor's of medical sciences, specifically, did an honors specialization in interdisciplinary medical sciences. So in terms of some of my other experience that I kind of brought into the role, obviously, some research background as well as working at a startup and some of that customer service and customer facing experience and, of course, a passion for science and business.

In terms of what my role at BioRender is, I help bring BioRender to academics. So what that looks like, I would usually be working closely with account executives to help increase the number of researchers with access to BioRender at different schools and companies. And also really just demoing the platform and platform features that might be useful to researchers based on their research and illustration needs. Kind of where I brought in the science background is getting to resonate with the researchers and how to optimize their BioRender use and experience. So if you love talking to people, talking about why products you love bring value to someone, this could be something interesting to you, so I'd love to chat with you.

Customer Success

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‍Thank you so much, Saba. So next up, and you might recognize them from a BioRender webinar too, I'll invite Simona Principe and Sydney Burniston, who are two of our customer success managers to share more about their role. 

Hi, everyone. I hope you guys can hear me okay. I am Simona, and I am one of the scientific communications and customer success managers here at BioRender. Super excited to be talking to you today. Prior to BioRender, I actually have got my PhD in immunology and pharmacology. And so I have worked as a research associate here at University Health Network in Toronto for many, many years. And basically, if we do the math, I was at the bench for over 13 years. And I've actually personally faced some similar challenges as all of you in creating what could clearly communicate the impact of my research around the world and beautiful figures that could assess the importance of my research in conferences, publications, and more. So I am super excited to be here today and happy to answer any questions you might have for me. And I'm just gonna hand it over to Sydney now. 

Awesome. Thanks, Simona. So, hi, everyone. I am Sydney Burnison. I am also a customer success manager here at BioRender. I have bachelor degrees in both molecular biology and genetics, as well as biomedical engineering from the University of Guelph here in Canada. And while my career did not bring me ever into the lab after school, I kind of hopped directly into tech. I'm really happy to be working at BioRender because it lets me kind of leverage that passion I have for scientific communication. 

So you can think of us as your BioRender consultants. So our primary role is to liaise with enterprise industry and academic partners and help them solve their visual communication challenges as well as cultivate BioRender advocates at those institutions. And then on top of that, we are also very passionate about training scientists on how to use the BioRender software. And we did really support scientists and their team throughout their journey with us.

So as we kind of mentioned throughout this introduction, our science background does really allow us to understand and also anticipate, which is more important, all of the challenges of the scientist space when creating their figures for any different research areas or topic.

Thank you so much. Appreciate you sharing a bit more about your roles and about the customer success teams. So I would like to welcome a couple of fantastic folks from our creative team.

Creative 

So Sally Kim and Samara Ona are going to talk about their roles as scientific designers here at BioRender. Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to meet all of you. So my name is Samara. I'm also a science designer as well as Sally, and I am studying my PhD at the University of Toronto in the Department of Medicine. Previously, I did my undergraduate degree in biotechnology engineering at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. My research interest is mainly about the structure of biology. 

Okay. So now that you guys know a bit more about who we are, now about what we do. So as scientific designers, Samara and I are responsible for creating the scientifically relevant and impactful templates that are available in the BioRender template library. We also help ensure that both the templates and the icons that are available at BioRender are scientifically accurate. So we often do that by fact checking the scientific content that's covered in a given template or by offering feedback to the medical illustrators that create the icons. In a similar way, we often also offer feedback and insight to other teams here at BioRender that may look for or need a scientist's opinion. Also, our scientific background really helps us to carry out the tasks that we perform as a science designer. Because we are currently PhD students, both of us have enough program knowledge and academic experience that give us enough expertise in our individual research areas. With this knowledge, we can make sure that the information that we are presenting in the templates is correct and up to date. We have an understanding of what a scientist is looking for in these types of figures. And this is very helpful, since we keep all the templates interesting topics.

Customer Experience

Thanks so much for sharing. Now, if you have ever hit that help button in the corner of BioRender, then you definitely know how fantastic our customer experience team is. So really excited to hand it over and introduce two of our representatives from that team. This is John Jarvis and Rachelle Zilber.

Hi, everyone. So my name is Rochelle, and I've been a customer experience representative at BioRender for about a month and a half now. I did a Bachelor of Science in human biology, and then I did a master's in microbiology. By contrast, all of my work experience was in customer service. So I had cosmetics and clothing retail experience. I had done a lot of telefundraising and sales for arts organizations. And I was really looking for a role where I would be able to combine my passion for customer service with my love of science and working on BioRender’s customer experience team offers me just that, so I'm really happy to be here.

And over to you, John. Hello. So I'm John. Pronouns are they/them. And I was in a bachelor of biochemistry at the University of British Columbia, but I also had actually started my degree at Dalhousie University in Halifax. So I went from one ocean to the other to learn the ins and outs of biochemistry. And I've been working at BioRender for over 15 months now. And I'm just really passionate about bringing a fantastic experience to all of our customers and act as their champions internally for product changes, issues with the app, etc. And I just love talking to really smart people and I get to do that all day. 

So in terms of what I do as a customer experience representative on a day to day basis, essentially, through chat, I am responding to a lot of questions users regarding their accounts, publication rights, purchasing or modifying their subscriptions, and also troubleshooting any issues or bugs that are happening with the app. And there are also some questions around illustrating the app itself, which actually are a minority of the inquiries we get. And because I'm still learning the app, those are really fun for me. And so there's that technical knowledge about how to take care of the particular issue the user is having. But a huge component of what we do in customer experience has to do with offering our clients, our users, the highest level of customer service. So there's a tremendous emphasis on the human side of the interaction. So being empathetic, approaching each user with an attitude of service is extremely important to us. So I really enjoy that we do get to connect with other human beings in this role, and they are human beings who happen to be doing amazing science as well.

In terms of how my background in life science helps me in my role, I don't think that the most relevant part of my background has to do with the actual knowledge of biology, but it's more about knowing how science is done. So, what academic conferences entail, how labs are organized, what the publication process is like, all of that allows me to guide our users to the most appropriate subscriptions or let them know what they might need to do in terms of getting publication licenses. So as much as our users appreciate that we have a biology background or a science background. It's knowing how their world operates that I think is the most helpful to them.

In addition to that, having any sort of illustration experience even if it's not with the BioRender app as I didn't have that when I was in school, is incredibly useful. Because that's sort of using any software to illustrate scientific models or figures, I think, it can be applied to using BioRender. And if you do already have experience using BioRender, then that is absolutely fantastic as well. 

And finally, as long as you love science, I think you're going to get a lot out of customer experience because you get to interface with so many scientists doing such amazing work. 

So I'm gonna speak a little bit about a team lead role that I've stepped into after over a year working on the customer experience team, working as a representative, moving into a space where I'm now.

More in an organizational role, as I say, before acting as the voice of the user is still always number 1 priority, but in my current position, I do a lot of organization of full time and part time team members to make sure that we have a flexible and I guess, adjustable work environment to take into account busy schedules, education, other positions just a huge variety of people work on the customer experience team, all with science backgrounds in some sense but just accommodating different types of lifestyles.

And then the last thing that I oversee is creating internal and external documentation. And you can see on the right side of the screen here, we have our external documentation sources including the help center, the learning hub where you can find videos and then, of course, as always, the chat that you can write to us to work in real time.

I think my background in biochemistry, really just gets me excited to step into these conversations with people who I have noticed often come into conversations maybe with some anxiety around their figures, concerns that they're not gonna be able to get something done worries about their features of the app and maybe not knowing how to use things. And then having them leave the conversations just be so excited to communicate with somebody who appreciates what they're doing and sees their direction and sees their inspiration, and it's just so exciting every single day.

As well having a background in biochemistry helps me understand sort of like nuanced technical issues around pathways or other technical aspects of their illustrations. And then also just getting to sit back and enjoy looking at awesome science all day. It's just so cool. So thanks for the opportunity to talk a little bit about this. 

Product and UX

Thank you so much, John and Rachelle. And now last but certainly not least, I would like to welcome Polly Zhang, who is our incredible product manager here at BioRinder to share more about her background and the product and UX roles here at BioRender. 

Thanks for the intro, Emily. So I'm a product manager here at BioRender who works specifically on all of the editor tools that you all interface with daily. So things like moving things into the library, dropping your images, changing your canvas background color, things like that. I have an undergrad degree in biochemistry from Queen's University, where I got to work on tons of amazing projects such as studying antifreeze proteins. I also spent a little bit of time in Suny Albany studying prostate cancer so I crossed the border for a period of time there before I started working in product.

To explain what I do on a day to day, I kind of juggle a bunch of different things during the day. I talk to every single team that operates here at BioRender. Communicating with the customer experience team, the customer success team to understand what issues and problems they're facing in their conversations with you all, I also directly interview scientists to really understand what their day to day pain points are.

Some of you actually might have sat in on a call with me. And I constantly look at all of the feedback that you all submit to the website, whether it be through surveys, or just the little feedback portals that we have everywhere. To try to answer two questions, what are the most important things we should focus on to make BioRender better? And then also, how can we build those things in the best way?

So I have this triple band diagram here on the side. That kind of shows in a nutshell that product management tries to balance technology, optimize business goals as well as responding to the most important user needs. My stem background helps me be really curious to really understand what are all the problems that you are facing before working on it on our end. I was working at a non-science company, and I got a question all the time, how did your science background help you end up here? I went to school to study biology because I was really curious about the world, and I was really willing to learn. And I think that's the most important skill that you should have in any job, but not only that, making all of those graphs and charts and being super stats focused in school helped me be really analytical and data driven. So really hearing what everyone is saying and looking at the numbers and sure that we are going the right way. And because I've done a lot of research myself, I'm empathetic towards all of your painful workflows, and I know how much BioRender is saving time for you.

One of the open rules that we have at BioRender right now is a UX researcher. So UX researchers mainly conduct interviews with users to uncover their needs and motivations. So what do they want to see next in BioRender and why? As you can see here in the chat, there were a lot of feature requests from new things to come into the app, a user researcher would look at all of those requests and maybe reach out to a couple of people and do interviews like, what we see on the right hand side here to have people show them how they're using BioRender, what issues are coming across and why their specific requests would make their lives easier. They'll analyze all this data and package it into actionable insights that the product team can then use to inform our next features that we're building.

Thank you so much, Polly. So as I mentioned earlier, BioRender is hiring and growing rapidly across all of our teams. So please head over to our careers page at BioRender.com/careers to learn more about all of our open roles.