Senior Principal Research Scientist, Computational Chemistry

Position Summary (Senior Principal Research Scientist, Computational Chemistry)
- Lead structure-based drug design meetings with medicinal chemists and provide senior-level, hands-on computational chemistry support
- Contribute to programs from target identification through lead optimization and drug candidate selection
- Apply structure-, ligand-, and fragment-based modeling to guide medicinal chemistry design
- Use molecular dynamics, free energy methods, quantum chemistry, and cheminformatics to support complex design and prioritization
- Translate computational analyses into clear, actionable compound design recommendations
- Serve as a scientific advisor within project teams
- Mentor and coach scientists in structure-based drug design
- Evaluate and adopt new computational methods, tools, and workflows
- Maintain scientific rigor, reproducibility, and best practices

Requirements
- PhD in Computational Chemistry (or related) with 9+ years pharmaceutical/biotech industry experience
- Strong knowledge of small molecule drug discovery and medicinal chemistry
- Expertise in structure-, ligand-, and fragment-based drug discovery
- Expertise in free energy perturbation, molecular dynamics, quantum mechanics, cheminformatics, and ligand affinity estimation
- Ability to independently deliver computational work influencing medicinal chemistry decisions
- Experience applying ML/AI to molecular design/property prediction/prioritization
- Experience with Schrödinger (and others such as MOE, OpenEye)
- Programming/scripting/statistics/data analysis experience for drug discovery
- Experience on challenging target classes (e.g., protein–protein interactions, allosteric pockets)
- Excellent oral and written communication; ability to manage priorities across multiple programs

Location/Workplace
- South San Francisco, CA; onsite 4 days/week
- Reporting to: Director & Head of Computational Chemistry