Medical Director and drug safety search

Physician searches in biotech are constrained differently from every other role we run. The number of MDs with industry experience in a given therapeutic area is genuinely small, most of them are employed, and the ones who are available are usually available for a reason worth understanding.

These searches are won by knowing who exists and having a reason for them to take the call, not by advertising harder.

The roles in this group

• Medical Director / Senior Medical Director. Medical monitoring, protocol medical input, investigator engagement, and safety oversight for a program.
• Safety physician / Drug Safety Medical Lead. Case-level medical review, signal detection, and benefit-risk assessment.
• Head of Pharmacovigilance. PV system ownership, inspection readiness, and vendor oversight, sometimes as a QPPV-adjacent role.
• Therapeutic area medical leadership across oncology, rare disease, ophthalmology, cell and gene therapy, vaccines, and others.

What we actually assess

• Real medical judgment on cases, not the ability to describe a process. We ask about a specific difficult case and listen to how they reasoned.
• Signal detection experience, including a signal they raised that turned out not to be one, and how they handled having been wrong in public.
• Comfort with the industry transition for candidates coming from clinical practice. This is the most common failure mode: an excellent clinician who is unhappy inside a matrixed organization within a year.
• Regulatory and inspection exposure. Having answered for a safety database in an inspection is a distinct and valuable experience.
• Willingness to be the person who says stop. The whole value of the role sits in that willingness.

Where these searches go wrong

Location requirements on a national pool

There is no version of a physician search where an on-site requirement is cheap. If the role can be remote or hybrid, the pool multiplies. If it genuinely cannot, that has to be priced in, both in comp and in time.

Underestimating the compensation conversation

Physician compensation expectations are shaped by clinical practice alternatives. A band that works for a PhD Director will not attract an MD, and finding that out at the offer stage costs a month.

Treating safety as a compliance hire

Companies that frame a safety physician role as a box to be checked attract candidates who treat it that way. The framing of the role in the market is part of the search.

How we run it

These searches are network searches. We work from who is actually out there in the therapeutic area rather than from who responds to a posting, approach directly and confidentially, and are candid with you early about pool size, comp reality, and what a realistic timeline looks like. Where a strong physician exists but is not movable on your timeline, we will tell you that rather than keeping the search warm.