Laboratory Operations Director

Who we are: At Arkana Laboratories, everyone has an important role to fill. Come join us and be a part of a team dedicated to making life better for those who need it most. This place is packed with super-smart people who do their best work together. We work hard every day to advance our understanding of disease and provide world-class care to our patients in hopes of leaving our corner of the world a little better than we found it. While we are committed to improving the lives of thousands of patients, we never lose sight of the realization that they are the reason we get to create change in our field. Built on generosity, teamwork, and the freedom to try new things, we take great pride in our work. Great ideas come from everywhere in this company and we celebrate each success and failure for the opportunity it gives us to keep reaching. For more than twenty years after our founder, Dr. Patrick Walker, wrote his goals on the back of a napkin, our people, culture, and values have remained strong. About Us Arkana Laboratories is packed with people who are dedicated to teamwork and excellence. Join us to help us fulfill our mission of advancing understanding of disease and providing world-class care to our patients. The Role As Laboratory Operations Director, you'll be responsible for the technical operations and continuous improvement of our anatomic pathology laboratory across multiple modalities: light microscopy (LM), immunofluorescence (IF), immunohistochemistry (IHC), electron microscopy (EM), neuropathology, and digital pathology. This isn't a desk job. You'll spend time on the floor in the lab, in meetings with pathologists, coaching managers, redesigning workflows, and figuring out how to make our lab better tomorrow than it is today. Your job is to translate our strategic vision into day-to-day reality, to design systems that work without constant firefighting, and to build a team that takes real pride in their technical expertise. Important note: You don't need to be an AP lab expert today. If you have strong leadership experience in clinical labs, research labs, or related technical fields—and you're willing to learn the specifics of anatomic pathology—we want to hear from you. We value leadership ability and a learning mindset as much as we value domain expertise. What You'll Do Build and improve the systems that make great work possible. You'll own technical quality and workflow design across every AP section; not just maintaining what exists, but actively making it better. That means spotting bottlenecks before they become crises, evaluating equipment, and technology investments with a clear eye toward quality and cost, and driving improvement as a habit rather than a project. Run Excellent Operations. Specimens should move through each section with the right quality and turnaround time, every day without the need for heroics on the part of our team. You'll work closely with operations on staffing and scheduling, keep communication flowing between technicians, pathologists, and leadership, and build a lab that catches problems early rather than reacting to them. Develop managers who develop their people. You'll lead and mentor section managers, setting clear expectations, delivering honest feedback, and holding people accountable in a way that's direct without being punitive. The goal isn't just well-run sections; rather, it's helping managers grow into strong technical and operational leaders. Build Training That Works. You'll own the technical curriculum across all sections, working with our training manager to translate our SOPs and workflows into a training curriculum. That means clear competency standards at each level, hands-on practice that sticks, and smart use of technology where it genuinely accelerates learning. Own Quality and Compliance. You'll partner with QA and physician leads to keep our quality systems strong, our scientific rigor uncompromising, and our lab ready for CAP, CLIA, FDA, and NY State inspections at all times. This means modeling the standards you expect, not just signing off on them. Drive Continuous Improvement. You'll lead initiatives that reduce manual work, cut variability, and prevent errors before they reach patients. That includes working with our teams to automate the things that don't need human judgment, freeing your people to focus on the work that does. You'll build improvement roadmaps, execute them, and more importantly, you'll help make improvement a reflex, not a special project we get to when things slow down. Use Data to Make Better Decisions. You'll track the metrics that matter — quality, turnaround time, rework rates, errors, training completion — and actually use them. That means basing your coaching and decisions on what the numbers show, reading early warning signs before small problems comp