Drug Discovery Scientist & Engineer

Socket.dev; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Fitness budget

Unlimited PTO

Hybrid in-office work

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Mirror, an NYC-based startup accelerating drug discovery with AI-powered agents, is seeking a scientist-builder to shape our platform. You’ll translate preclinical expertise into software requirements, work closely with engineers, and drive evaluations that ensure scientific rigor.

You’ll blend deep domain knowledge with an engineering mindset, collaborating with customers and internal teams to improve agents and establish scalable, reproducible workflows in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Multiple years of hands-on preclinical development experience in biotechnology or pharmaceuticals.
• Deep expertise in one or more areas of drug discovery with understanding of the broader development pipeline.
• Engineering mindset with computational and software development basics and familiarity with modern AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Translate real preclinical workflows into requirements for agent behavior and product features.
• Collaborate with engineers to prototype, test, and improve agents across drug discovery tasks.
• Design and run evaluations to measure scientific quality and reliability of agents.

Skills

Preclinical exp

Drug discovery

Engineering mindset

Rapid learner

Clear communicator

Customer-facing

Job description

The Company

Mirror is an NYC-based startup building the AI stack for modern drug discovery. We develop agents that give scientists the leverage to explore, test, and advance new medicines faster and at lower cost. Our platform focuses on bridging the gap between frontier model capabilities and the practical challenges faced by biologists and chemists across the preclinical pipeline to dramatically accelerate scientists’ daily work, without sacrificing transparency, control, or data security. By compounding advancements in agent performance, efficiency, and reliability, we’re paving the way toward transforming therapeutics development and unlocking a new era of human health.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• Full health, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
• Personal fitness budget
• Unlimited PTO and all national holidays
• Location & Work Model
• We expect you to get things done, whatever it takes. We’re typically in-office. Visa sponsorship is available.

Equal Opportunity

Mirror is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for our employees.

The Opportunity

AI for drug discovery is only useful when it reflects how drug programs are actually run. Product quality depends on scientific judgment: understanding which evidence matters, which constraints are real, where workflows fail, and what a trustworthy result looks like.

We’re looking for a scientist with multiple years of industry experience in preclinical development who wants to turn their expertise into software. This is a hybrid scientist-builder role: you’ll work closely with engineers, customers, and other domain experts to shape our platform, improve our agents, and establish the evaluations that hold them to a high scientific standard.

Why This Role

Deep specialization is essential to drug discovery. This role offers a chance to apply that depth differently—by building systems that make expert workflows repeatable and scalable—while developing breadth across modalities, therapeutic areas, and stages of preclinical development.

You’ll learn directly from specialists and customers, translate that knowledge into products and evaluation systems, and help make high-quality scientific reasoning available at scale.

What You’ll Do

• Translate real preclinical workflows and scientific judgment into requirements for agent behavior, product features, tool integrations, and evaluations.
• Work hands-on with engineering to prototype, test, diagnose, and improve agents across drug discovery tasks.
• Design and run benchmarks, evaluations, and internal validation efforts that measure scientific quality, reliability, and usefulness.
• Explore unfamiliar drug discovery domains; synthesize new methods, tools, and developments; and explain their implications to the team.
• Work directly with current and prospective customers through discovery, education, product feedback, and commercial conversations.
• Help set scientific product priorities and serve as a trusted domain expert across the company.
• Help grow Mirror’s drug discovery team.

What We’re Looking For

• Multiple years of hands-on preclinical development experience in biotechnology or pharmaceuticals.
• Deep expertise in one or more areas of drug discovery, together with a strong working understanding of the broader therapeutics development pipeline and how cross-functional programs are planned, evaluated, and advanced.
• An engineering mindset and foundational computational and software development skills, with familiarity with modern AI systems.
• A record of learning unfamiliar scientific and technical domains quickly and turning new knowledge into practical decisions.
• The ability to explain complex ideas clearly to scientific, technical, and commercial audiences.
• Comfort working directly with customers and participating in product and commercial conversations.
• Curiosity, intellectual honesty, strong ownership, and the ability to move quickly without compromising rigor.