Cheminformatics Research Scientist

Exscientia is an AI-driven pharmatech company committed to discovering, designing and developing the best possible drugs in the fastest and most effective manner. Exscientia developed the first-ever functional precision oncology platform to successfully guide treatment selection and improve patient outcomes in a prospective interventional clinical study, as well as to progress AI-designed small molecules into the clinical setting.

Our pipeline demonstrates our ability to rapidly translate scientific concepts into precision-designed therapeutic candidates, with more than 25 projects underway. By designing better drugs, faster, we believe the best ideas of science can rapidly become the best medicines for patients.

Cheminformatics methods are an important component of our predictive and generative AI capabilities and are the bedrock of how we generate, prioritize and select the most efficient molecules for our drug discovery programs.

At Exscientia, you will use your cheminformatics knowledge to develop new capabilities that have broad impact across out drug design process, drive cutting-edge science to enable novel approaches to generative molecule design and selection, all while maintaining a high level of software engineering standards. This role will be focussed on the intersection between automated drug design and chemical synthesis, developing methods to bridge these domains and significantly accelerate the drug design process.

You will be part of a friendly and talented team of research scientists and engineers, with diverse scientific backgrounds, who develop novel methods that are applied at different stages of the drug discovery process, ranging from hit discovery to pre-clinical optimisation. Collaboration is a cornerstone of our success, and you will have the opportunity every day to work closely with experts from other domains such as experienced drug designers and medicinal chemists.

This role is an exciting opportunity for researchers or developers with a deep interest in computational approaches to drug design, are keen on creating high-quality tools that make an impact on drug discovery projects and thrive in collaborative and interdisciplinary environments.

What you will do

• Develop and maintain 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.
• Collaborate with research scientists, medicinal chemists and computational drug designers to translate their requirements into algorithmic improvements and new capabilities.
• Promote new methods through effective communication with stakeholders, training sessions and supporting users directly with their coding tasks.
• Stay informed on new technology developments, analyse them for potential benefits to our platform and devise plans for their implementation.

Requirements

• 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.
• Necessary programming skills to implement data structures and complex algorithms using numerical and computational chemistry toolkits (e.g. RDKit, OpenEye).
• Proficiency in Python.
• Software development experience to confidently design and implement modules, packages, applications and APIs.

Beneficial skills and experience

• Keen interest in artificial intelligence and its application to drug discovery.
• Familiarity with approaches to representing and manipulating chemical reactions in cheminformatics.
• Experience in the domain of synthesis prediction – the development of approaches to promote the generation of synthesisable molecules and / or the prediction of synthesis routes and reaction conditions.
• Experience with major machine learning frameworks such as scikit-learn or PyTorch.
• 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.

Benefits

• Work together to make a positive contribution to patients by revolutionising the pharmaceutical industry through AI-driven discovery.
• We will work with you to kick-start or further grow your career – from funding for professional development and conference attendance. To the opportunity to acquire valuable skills, work on problems that matter, and learn from world-class technological and scientific leaders.
• Opportunity to join an inclusive, collaborative and intellectually stimulating culture
• We will work with you to provide a highly competitive compensation as we continue to grow and thrive.
• Our team’s health and well-being is important to us we offer a generous holiday allowance, provide flexible working and remote working to encourage all of our team to manage their own work, time and life along with wellbeing and mindfulness support.
• When you are in the office, you will have access to a kitchen stocked with an endless supply of food for all employees. Along with access plenty of break out areas so you can get to know the people you are working with. Some of the best ideas start with a coffee break!
• Hear from our team why they enjoy working here