Medicinal Chemist

Inductive Bio; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Healthcare benefits

Growth opportunities

Job summary

Inductive Bio is seeking an accomplished Medicinal Chemist to help build an AI-forward drug discovery platform that spans the DMTA cycle. You’ll embed with partner programs, combining med-chem expertise with predictive models and AI workflows to advance small molecules toward development candidates.

You will collaborate with in-house comp chem, DMPK, and ML colleagues, and engage with CRO partners to deliver high-quality answers fast.

Qualifications

• Candidates should have a strong background in synthetic organic chemistry and hands-on drug discovery experience.
• Direct experience advancing compounds toward development candidate status is preferred.
• Experience collaborating with CROs and external partners is desirable.
• Familiarity with predictive models, AI workflows, and automation in medicinal chemistry is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Be embedded with partner drug discovery programs from lead generation to development candidate nomination.
• Collaborate with compchem, DMPK, and ML teams to apply Inductive’s tools on partner projects.
• Help deliver value through Inductive’s experimental offerings with CRO partners to test hypotheses.
• Contribute to building an AI-native drug discovery platform to speed clinical progression.
• Represent Inductive in the field, gather feedback, and engage with conferences and publications.

Skills

Synthetic organic chemistry

Drug discovery experience

Experience with CROs

AI/ML in drug design

Job description

Inductive Bio is an AI medicinal chemistry partner. We build virtual labs that help drug discovery teams make better decisions, faster, across the full DMTA cycle. Our platform includes Beacon-1 ADMET prediction models, human dose projection tools, and Indy, an AI medicinal chemistry assistant. Through partnerships with CROs, we also offer innovative synthesis approaches, direct-to-dose testing, and cost-effective tier 1 ADME panels that enable initial human PK projection, closing the loop from computational design to experimental validation. Together, these power dozens of small molecule and beyond-rule-of-five programs for biotech and pharma partners.

Beacon-1 placed 1st in both the 2025 Polaris and 2026 OpenADMET-ExpansionRx blind competitions, ahead of Merck & Co + NVIDIA and EMD Serono.

We’ve raised $30M from Obvious Ventures, a16z Bio + Health, and Lux Capital, and were selected for a $21M ARPA-H CATALYST award to develop next-generation toxicity models.

We are seeking an accomplished Medicinal Chemist to play a key role in building an AI-forward drug discovery platform that impacts all stages of the Design-Make-Test-Analyze cycle, and deploy that platform to dozens of programs across the industry! This role will report directly to our Head of Medicinal Chemistry.

What you’ll do:

• Be an embedded expert, supporting a variety of partner drug discovery programs from lead generation through development candidate nomination across diverse small molecule modalities.

• Alongside outstanding compchem, DMPK, and machine learning colleagues, bring Inductive’s tools and your medchem knowledge to our work as consultants on partners’ projects.

• Help deliver value to partners through Inductive’s experimental offerings, where we combine our drug discovery experience, predictive models, and AI workflows with our chemistry and assay CRO partners to answer hypotheses effectively.

• Build an AI-native drug discovery platform that will speed drugs to the clinic. Help make your ideas about how to improve the DMTA cycle a reality, as we flesh out Indy (our AI medicinal chemistry agent) and build assay and synthesis workflows that get to high-quality answers more quickly.

• Represent Inductive’s mission and build connections in the field, meeting with current and potential partners, gathering feedback about what drug discovery teams need, attending conferences and meetings, giving presentations, and authoring blog posts and publications.

Who you are:

• An ideal candidate is a creative and accomplished medicinal chemist with a synthetic organic chemistry background who has played a meaningful role in advancing compounds to the development candidate stage. You are excited about working with partners to progress their programs, and you want to build the next generation of tools for drug discovery!

• You have direct experience at all stages of drug discovery projects, and can point to go/no go judgement calls you’ve made in lead generation and lead optimization.

• You’ve used different approaches to evaluate compound quality, from LLE to dose prediction, and appreciate the importance of contextualizing results in terms of their expected profile in humans.

• The more modalities you’ve worked with, the better, from reversible and covalent to heterobifunctionals and peptides.

• Along with designing compounds and analyzing data, you have years of experience in chemical synthesis with CROs. As you think about synthetic strategy, you look for convergent routes and late-stage intermediates.

• You communicate effectively and proactively, seek feedback, handle proprietary information with discretion, embrace transparency, and treat others with respect.

• Experience with predictive models and automation is a plus! (e.g. FEP, predictive ADME, AI retrosynthesis, direct to biology)

Working at Inductive

At Inductive Bio, we know that the people on the team are what make us great. We are a passionate, kind, and mature team. Working at a fast-growing startup is not always a 9-5 job, but we believe that our employees should have full lives beyond their career.

• competitive salary and equity-based compensation
• comprehensive healthcare benefits (including dental and vision)
• opportunity to grow along with a rapidly scaling company