Founding Computational Chemist - Synthesis & AI Lab

Ai Bio; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 days annual leave

Pension 10% employer contribution

Private health cover

Job summary

You will define standards, write production code, and shape the capability early on. This founding seat will require learning fast, collaborating across disciplines, and pushing planning that the platform can actually execute.

Qualifications

• Grounding in synthetic organic chemistry and translating judgement into computational rules.
• Rigorous handling of chemical structures in digital form, including stereochemistry and tautomers.
• Experience with retrosynthesis or computer-aided synthesis planning, evaluating routes.
• Reasoning about reactions, feasibility, reagents, conditions and evidence.
• Planning across many targets to find shared chemistry and scalable routes.
• Balancing route quality, diversity, cost, and throughput; understanding trade-offs.
• Familiarity with RDKit or equivalent cheminformatics tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own computational chemistry end-to-end from molecules to lab execution plan.
• Collaborate with chemists, automation scientists and engineers daily.
• Translate tacit chemist knowledge into reproducible rules, models and workflows.
• Define platform planning constraints: blocks, reagents, reaction classes and conditions.
• Develop registration and identity handling for compounds, including stereochemistry and salts.
• Integrate planning with synthesis, experimental results and digital chemistry stack.

Skills

Synthetic chemistry

Cheminformatics

Retrosynthesis planning

Reaction feasibility reasoning

Multi-target planning

Trade-offs analysis

RDKit

Education

PhD in chemistry/cheminformatics

Bachelor's in chemistry

Tools

RDKit

APIs

Chemical databases

LIMS

Job description

You will define standards, write production code, and shape the capability early on. This founding seat will require learning fast, collaborating across disciplines, and pushing planning that the platform can actually execute.