Research & Development Leadership — CSO, CTO (R&D), VP R&D

Research & Development covers Chief Scientific Officers, VPs of R&D, Heads of Research across biotech, pharma, materials, and deep-tech. The unifying signature: ownership of multi-year technical bets that aren't the day-to-day product roadmap.

Includes Chief Medical Officer roles in biotech/pharma when the seat carries scientific direction-setting, plus Heads of Applied Research at tech companies whose work feeds future products rather than current ones.

Across the 289 active roles in this category, the largest tier is VP. The classifier weighs company size, scope, and reporting line — not just the title prefix — so the tier mix reflects real responsibility, not vanity titles.

Research & Development classification follows the same multi-stage pipeline as every other category, with category-specific signal at three stages:

1. Title recognition. Direct title hits resolve fast — common variants are recognized immediately, including the senior, VP, and Director-tier flavors.
2. Compensation threshold. An exec-tier base-comp floor filters out individual-contributor roles that share the title language. Roles below the floor in unambiguous category titles are flagged for manual review rather than auto-classified.
3. JD signals for ambiguous cases. GPT reads the JD for scientific-direction authority, IP/clinical-pipeline ownership, and external scientific stature. The classifier separates true R&D leaders from product-engineering managers using research-flavored titles. See the AI Classification page for the full signal hierarchy.

Negative filters explicitly block adjacent IC and analyst roles whose titles can resemble executive ones. The result: Research & Development as a category in your inbox is the executive cut, not the entry-level cut.

Matching on Research & Development is conjunctive. Every dimension you add narrows the result set rather than expanding it.

Example: select Research & Development + Biotech & Life Sciences and you see CSOs and VPs of R&D at therapeutics and devices companies — not engineering managers in tech — your inbox shows the intersection, not the union. You won't see roles that match only one of the filters and not the other.

Tier filtering layers on top. If you only want VP-tier and above in this category, the seniority-tier filter does that cleanly. Restrict further to C-suite only to see the most senior seats, or open it up to Director-tier to widen the funnel during early-stage exploration.