Director, Clinical Applications

The Director builds and leads a high-performing organization that advances clinical excellence, digital readiness, and customer trust, playing a key role in positioning Stago as the clinical partner of choice and a leader in digitally enabled hemostasis solutions.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

Customer Experience & Clinical Excellence Leadership:

• Own the end-to-end customer experience across the Clinical Applications organization, including clinical applications, training, digital support, implementation, validation, troubleshooting, workflow optimization, and ongoing customer enablement.
• Ensure consistent delivery of high-quality customer implementations, validations, training programs, technical support, and workflow improvement initiatives.
• Establish Stago as a trusted clinical partner by ensuring customer-facing teams deliver expertise, responsiveness, professionalism, and measurable value.
• Personally engage in high-impact customer escalations, VIP account support, strategic partnerships, and complex customer-facing situations requiring senior leadership involvement.
• Drive a customer-first culture where every action, decision, and process is designed to improve customer confidence, satisfaction, retention, and long-term success.

Organizational Leadership & Talent Development:

• Lead, develop, and inspire a high-performing, multi-level team across Applications, Training, and Digital functions.
• Establish clear roles, responsibilities, expectations, and career pathways across the organization.
• Develop and implement competency frameworks across key areas, as determined by Executive leadership.
• Partner with senior leadership, as applicable, to build strong onboarding, training, coaching, mentoring, and succession planning programs to ensure organizational depth and consistency.
• Create a culture of accountability, collaboration, knowledge sharing, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.
• Identify capability gaps across regions and teams and develop targeted plans to improve consistency, confidence, and execution.

Escalation Management & Operational Excellence:

• Build an environment where regional escalations align with a clear national escalation framework, ensuring timely triage, cross-functional alignment, documentation, root cause analysis, and resolution.
• Define and enforce structured escalation triggers, ownership expectations, communication standards, resolution timelines, and closure requirements.
• Drive reduction in repeat issues through data analysis, root cause trending, SOP optimization, documentation improvements, and targeted training.
• Ensure all teams operate in full compliance with company policies, regulatory requirements, quality standards, and customer expectations.
• Establish key operational metrics to improve responsiveness, escalation quality, implementation success, customer satisfaction, and team performance. Monitor KPIs, dashboards, reporting mechanisms across Applications, Training and Digital Teams.

Digital Strategy & Integration Leadership:

• Oversee the Digital Solutions function to ensure strong alignment between clinical workflows, middleware, connectivity, cybersecurity readiness, remote solutions, and customer implementation needs.
• Ensure digital capabilities are embedded across all customer-facing teams, including Applications, Training, Sales, Service, and Hotline.
• Support the development of digital playbooks, readiness checklists, implementation workflows, escalation pathways, and customer-facing documentation.
• Position Stago as a leader in digitally enabled hemostasis solutions by ensuring customers can successfully implement, adopt, and optimize Stago's digital platforms and integrated workflows.

Technical Excellence, Validation Governance & Escalation Rigor:

• Establish and standardize national validation and implementation practices aligned with CLSI, CAP and industry standards, ensuring consistent QC, Westgard, IQCP, and assay validation execution across regions.
• Monitor the data trends to drive targeted training, technical coaching, preventative actions, SOP improvements, and field execution consistency.
• Collaborate with all applicable teams to continuously evolve validation templates, SOPs, technical training programs, and customer-facing tools.
• Serve as the executive sponsor for technical integrity, ensuring Stago maintains the highest standards of clinical accuracy, reproducibility, reliability, and customer confidence across the installed base.

Strategic Growth & Business Impact:

• Contribute directly to revenue growth through improved customer utilization, retention, expansion, solution adoption, and customer loyalty.
• Support pre-sale strategy, customer evaluations, workflow assessments, and key account engagements where clinical expertise and implementation confidence are critical to winning or retaining business.
• Identify opportunities to improve efficiency, scalability, cost management, resource planning, and operational consistency across the organization
• Develop business cases for new services, staffing models, tools, digital capabilities, professional services, or process improvements.
• Maintain accountability for budget, resource allocation, workforce planning, operational planning, and performance against departmental goals.
• Partner with senior leadership to align Clinical Applications and Digital Solutions strategy with broader company priorities, customer needs, and market growth opportunities.

Provide regular reporting to executive leadership on the requested topics.

Create a continuous improvement operating rhythm that connects field insights, escalation trends, customer feedback, product opportunities, training needs, and process improvements.

Ensure leadership has visibility into risks, resource needs, customer concerns, and opportunities for growth or operational improvement.

Participate in internal and external audits.

Education and/or Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Medical Laboratory Science, Biomedical Engineering, Life Sciences, Healthcare Administration, Business, Information Technology, or a related field required. Advanced degree preferred.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in clinical diagnostics, IVD applications, laboratory operations, customer support, field applications, digital solutions, or related healthcare technology environments.
• 5+ years of experience leading multi-level technical, clinical, field applications, training, digital, or customer-facing teams.
• Experience with LIS, middleware, laboratory automation workflows, remote connectivity, cybersecurity considerations, and digital solutions. Proficiency with Microsoft Office and business reporting platforms.
• Strong experience in clinical laboratory workflows, customer implementation, validation, troubleshooting, technical support, and workflow optimization.
• Demonstrated experience managing complex escalations, high-impact customer situations, and cross-functional initiatives.
• Experience leading through organizational change, building scalable processes, and developing high-performing teams.
• Strong understanding of hemostasis and coagulation testing.
• Knowledge of CLSI validation protocols, method verification, lot conversion, correlation studies, assay validation, and clinical laboratory best practices.
• Strong understanding of QC, Westgard rules, IQCP, CAP, CLIA, and laboratory accreditation expectations.
• Ability to understand and translate technical, clinical, digital, and operational requirements into scalable customer-facing processes.
• Experience using data, KPIs, dashboards, CRM systems, reporting tools, and business systems to drive operational improvement.
• Current Drivers License and Passport.
• Ability to travel up to 50-75%, including customer visits, field ride-alongs, regional team development, strategic account support, executive meetings, national meetings, and cross-functional business reviews. Ability to travel internationally.

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship, disability or protected veteran status.