Material Planner

More than one million people in the United States today are fighting blood cancer. While a traditional allogeneic stem cell transplant has been the best hope for many, the transplant itself can prove fatal or lead to serious conditions, such as graft vs. host disease. Orca Bio is a commercial-stage biotechnology company redefining the transplant process by developing next-generation cell therapies with the goal of providing significantly better survival rates with dramatically fewer risks. With our purified, high-precision cell therapies we hope to not only replace patients' blood and immune systems with healthy ones, but also restore their lives.   We have built a state-of-the-art, 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Sacramento, CA (7910 Metro Air Pkwy) to ensure the consistent and reliable delivery of our high-precision cell therapy products. This site is essential to advancing our clinical pipeline and supporting future commercial availability of our life-saving therapies.

The Material Planner ensures material availability for clinical and commercial cell therapy manufacturing by translating production plans and patient demand into material requirements. This role partners cross-functionally to maintain material readiness, mitigate supply risks, and support on-time manufacturing and patient delivery. The role also provides backup support for production planning and scheduling as needed.

Physical Demands & Work Conditions

• Production Associates: Must have visual acuity of 20/20 (corrected or uncorrected) and normal color vision to safely perform critical tasks such as visual inspection of materials, equipment, and labeling, including distinguishing color-coded components in a GMP environment.
• Must meet cleanroom gowning requirements, including wearing full gowning (face coverings, gloves, hoods, goggles) for up to 3 consecutive hours at a time, minimal movement in the cleanroom, and working with or around human blood, blood-derived materials, cells, other biological materials, and alcohol-based sprays. Use of cosmetics (makeup, painted nails), jewelry, or facial piercings is not permitted in the cleanroom, and any skin conditions that cause shedding must be disclosed.
• Must be comfortable regularly participating in video-based meetings.

Essential Duties & Key Responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain material requirements based on production plans, patient demand, forecasts, bills of materials, lead times, and inventory levels.
• Monitor inventory levels, shelf life, expiration risks, and replenishment parameters to ensure availability of critical manufacturing and QC materials.
• Coordinate with Procurement, Warehouse, Quality, QC, and suppliers to ensure materials are ordered, received, released, and available when needed.
• Identify and proactively communicate material shortages, supply constraints, and other risks that could impact manufacturing schedules or patient delivery.