Senior Cheminformatics Research Scientist

At Recursion, our mission is to transform drug discovery through a powerful synthesis of AI, automation, and deep scientific expertise. Cheminformatics is the backbone of our predictive and generative modeling capabilities, and our technology platforms are the engine driving drug discovery programmes with unparalleled speed and efficiency.

We are looking for a talented Senior Cheminformatics Research Scientist to be at the forefront of this mission. You will be instrumental in developing the scientifically intelligent automations that form our core discovery platform. Working with top-tier teams of drug designers, domain experts, and software engineers, you will design and implement the systems that power our programs. This is a unique opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI-driven drug design and see the capabilities you build have a direct and immediate impact on discovering new medicines

In this role, you will:

• Use your technical foundation to make significant code contributions and collaborate across disciplines
• Ideate and develop new approaches to transform our core Hit Identification, Hit to Lead and Lead Optimisation processes by translating insights from drug designers and collaborating with domain experts in AI, Informatics, and Physics-based Modelling to build novel workflows. 
• Develop and maintain the core cheminformatics capabilities and libraries routinely used by our drug designers.
• Collaborate with AI Research Engineers to enhance our generative approaches to molecule design.Collaborate within interdisciplinary drug discovery teams to advance pharmaceutical programmes
• Contribute to the design of AI/data science methods to expedite the Design-Make-Test-Analyze discovery cycle
• Lead the development of production-grade toolkits and libraries at the intersection of cheminformatics, computational chemistry, structural bioinformatics and artificial intelligence to continuously improve the productivity and capabilities of our drug discovery processes
• Define research and development priorities in the cheminformatics space including robust timelines and deliverables
• Collaborate with research scientists, medicinal chemists and computational drug designers to translate their requirements into algorithmic improvements and new capabilities
• Work with software engineers to implement these algorithms into our core technology platform
• Promote new methods through effective communication with stakeholders, training sessions and supporting users directly with their coding tasks
• Stay at the frontier of new technology developments, analyze them for potential benefits to our platform and devise plans for their implementation
• Be an external advocate for the company within the cheminformatics community

The Team You'll Join:

You will be an essential member of the Recursion Digital Chemistry team. The Digital Chemistry Team is an empowered, execution-minded group of drug discovery professionals responsible for translating Recursion's innovative science to patients through hit identification and lead optimization activities. Our desire to make a difference and contribute to our mission of decoding biology to radically improve lives drives everything we do. In your role, you will collaborate cross-functionally within the Chemistry, Biology and Data Science teams to ensure successful planning and execution of discovery operations.

The Experience You’ll Need:

• Degree in chemistry, cheminformatics, structural bioinformatics a related field or a degree in computer science with the chemistry knowledge stemming from extensive professional experience
• Sufficient knowledge in medicinal chemistry to understand drug design and how computational methods are applied in the process from hit discovery to lead optimization
• Hands-on experience developing and deploying scientific software or toolkits that were successfully used to solve drug discovery problems
• Strong expertise in Python, necessary programming skills to implement data structures and complex algorithms using numerical and computational chemistry toolkits (e.g. RDKit, OpenEye).
• Software development experience to confidently design and implement modules, packages, applications and APIs. Familiarity with CI/CD practices and the deployment of containerised applications
• Hands-on experience with best software development practices and particularly in a collaborative environment.Increasing the scalability of computational methods through deployments on cloud computing platforms such as AWS, GCP or Azure. 

Beneficial Skills and Experience:

• Keen interest in artificial intelligence and its application to drug discovery
• Understanding of ligand- and structure-based drug design.
• Experience with machine learning and major machine learning frameworks such as scikit-learn or PyTorch
• Proficiency in a low-level programming language such as C/C++ or Rust.
• Knowledge of advanced data analysis techniques such as multi-parameter optimization
• Open source contributions or publications in academic journals demonstrating experience in scientific method development and innovation

Working Location & Compensation:

This is an office-based, hybrid position at our office in London, England. Employees are expected to work in the office at least 50% of the time. At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is £86,300 - £115,500 GBP. You will also be eligible for an annual bonus and equity compensation, as well as a comprehensive benefits package. 

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