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Director/Sr Director, Computational Discovery
Full Time
Palo Alto, California, United States (This job can be hybrid)
Job description
Scismic is supporting the growth of a biotech startup whose founder has dedicated over a decade to developing machine learning models to identify chemical structures that can translate into effective therapies for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, ALS and Parksinson's. The company already has a significant amount of in vitro validation data under their belt, and are beginning target engagement in vivo animal studies.
This is an incredibly exciting time to join the team. This company is hiring a small team and building out a new lab space in the Bay Area. You will have a major impact on accelerating our platform to expand our chemical structure/small molecule discovery pipeline that will be tested in vitro and in vivo with the goal of advancing them to clinical trials.
About the role
In this role, you'll be responsible for crafting the company's computational strategy, and implementing said strategy. You will work closely with medicinal chemistry, preclinical sciences, and data sciences/software engineering to understand the potential from our in-house data and publicly available data to better understand the mechanism of action of our drugs, how they interact with protein aggregates, and how to optimize our structures to increase potency and other desirable drug properties. You will look for innovative but implementable solutions that can provide competitive advantages to the company, including reducing the number of iteration cycles we need to get to a lead, and designing better leads that have a higher chance of working in humans. This person leads with a deep knowledge of computational chemistry, and is comfortable scoping the strategy for data science, machine learning and software, with the collaboration and input from employees and KOLs with expertise in those areas.
About the role
In this role, you'll be responsible for crafting the company's computational strategy, and implementing said strategy. You will work closely with medicinal chemistry, preclinical sciences, and data sciences/software engineering to understand the potential from our in-house data and publicly available data to better understand the mechanism of action of our drugs, how they interact with protein aggregates, and how to optimize our structures to increase potency and other desirable drug properties. You will look for innovative but implementable solutions that can provide competitive advantages to the company, including reducing the number of iteration cycles we need to get to a lead, and designing better leads that have a higher chance of working in humans. This person leads with a deep knowledge of computational chemistry, and is comfortable scoping the strategy for data science, machine learning and software, with the collaboration and input from employees and KOLs with expertise in those areas.
Qualifications
- MS/PhD computational chemistry, machine learning, chemoinformatics, biomedical informatics, computational biology, or applied statistics
- Experience in some combination of computational chemistry, machine learning, chemoinformatics, chemical structure modeling, and/or protein structure modeling, graphical modeling, and/or deep learning
- Able to craft strategies and implementation roadmaps for computational efforts
- Extensive industry experience leading strategic computational chemistry efforts required
Experience in drug discovery in an industry setting required - Experience collaborating with benchlab scientists and data scientists required
- Industry experience implementing some machine learning methods and/or overseeing machine learning methods strategy preferred
- Experience working with protein aggregates a plus
- Experience with people management a plus
About the team
This hire will report to the CEO. You will also collaborate closely with the VP of R&D and Director of
Preclinical Research.
This hire will report to the CEO. You will also collaborate closely with the VP of R&D and Director of
Preclinical Research.
Location
The company's labs are located in the Bay Area, with a small satellite office in Santa Barbara. The
ideal schedule is 1 to 2 days onsite to brainstorm and collaborate with team members, but
flexibility would be offered for the right candidate.