Principal Scientist - Semantic AI for Drug Discovery

Scorpion Therapeutics; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Vacation time

Sick leave

Parental leave

Bereavement leave

Volunteer leave

Military spouse leave

Job summary

Scorpion Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA, seeks a senior Biomedical Informatics Architect to establish semantic foundations for AI-driven reasoning across discovery, preclinical, and clinical development.

You will lead ontology governance, build RDF-based knowledge graphs, and harmonize translational data (SEND, SDTM, ADaM, MedDRA, FHIR) while partnering with research and engineering teams.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s in Biomedical Informatics, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Science, Information Science, Knowledge Engineering, or related.
• 5+ years in biomedical informatics/semantic technologies/knowledge engineering/scientific data architecture.
• Experience designing ontology-driven systems in life sciences/healthcare/pharma R&D; across multiple drug discovery/development phases.

Responsibilities

• Semantic Architecture & Knowledge Modeling: design/maintain enterprise knowledge models across discovery biology, toxicology, safety pharmacology, pathology, clinical development, pharmacovigilance, real-world evidence.
• Ontology Engineering & Governance: lead ontology strategy, development, governance, lifecycle management; curate/extend biomedical ontologies; ensure provenance/traceability and FAIR principles.
• Knowledge Graph & Reasoning Infrastructure: build RDF-based knowledge graph architectures; develop semantic mappings/inference rules/reasoning frameworks; enable GraphRAG, semantic retrieval, AI agents, reasoning.
• Translational Data Harmonization: create semantic bridges across SEND, SDTM, ADaM, MedDRA, HPO, MONDO, SNOMED CT, FHIR, OMOP, Cell Ontology, Protein Ontology.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: partner with stakeholders and engineering/platform teams; influence enterprise semantic strategy.

Skills

Biomedical informatics

Ontology engineering

Knowledge graphs

RDF/OWL/SPARQL

FAIR data principles

Education

PhD or Master’s in Biomedical Informatics

Tools

SHACL

RDF graph architectures

Job description

Scorpion Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA, seeks a senior Biomedical Informatics Architect to establish semantic foundations for AI-driven reasoning across discovery, preclinical, and clinical development.

You will lead ontology governance, build RDF-based knowledge graphs, and harmonize translational data (SEND, SDTM, ADaM, MedDRA, FHIR) while partnering with research and engineering teams.