Medicinal Chemist – AI‑Driven Lead Optimization

Edison Scientific, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & equity

Full healthcare coverage

Parental leave & fertility coverage

Mental health support

401(k) company matching

Health & wellness stipend

Daily meals in the office

Commuter benefits

Job summary

Edison Scientific, Inc. is seeking a Medicinal Chemist to join our Forward Deployed team, embedded with pharma and biotech partners alongside engineers and computational biologists.

Your role is to ensure AI-generated chemistry is credible, synthesizable, and valuable to real drug discovery teams. You’ll build benchmarks, evaluate agent outputs, and work with partner chemists to maximize value across design, synthesis, testing, and analytics cycles.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, or a related field and 5+ years of industry experience
• Track record in lead optimization campaigns from hit identification through candidate nomination
• Deep knowledge of cheminformatics tools such as RDKit, Schrödinger, or MOE
• Experience integrating ADMET and DMPK data into design decisions
• Ability to travel domestically 20-40% of the time

Responsibilities

• Improve AI agent performance to hit-to-lead chemistry tasks including SAR analysis, structure-based design, and synthetic feasibility analysis
• Design benchmarks and acceptance criteria for chemistry focused agent workflows
• Partner with medicinal chemists at client organizations to integrate AI agents into their discovery workflows
• Serve as the chemistry expert on AI generated outputs, assessing structural soundness, flagging failure modes, and determining what's actionable
• Collaborate daily with Forward Deployed Engineers and Computational Biologists on each account
• Support engagement scoping, success metrics, and technical evaluation with our go-to-market team members

Skills

Python

Therapeutic areas experience

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, or a related field

Tools

RDKit

Schrödinger

MOE

Job description

Edison Scientific, Inc. is seeking a Medicinal Chemist to join our Forward Deployed team, embedded with pharma and biotech partners alongside engineers and computational biologists.

Your role is to ensure AI-generated chemistry is credible, synthesizable, and valuable to real drug discovery teams. You’ll build benchmarks, evaluate agent outputs, and work with partner chemists to maximize value across design, synthesis, testing, and analytics cycles.