Senior Principal Computational Chemist — Onsite 4x/wk

BioSpace; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 196,000 - 242,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/dental/vision coverage

401k and ESPP

Stock option awards

Job summary

IDEAYA Biosciences in South San Francisco is seeking a Senior Principal Research Scientist in Computational Chemistry to advance small-molecule drug discovery. The role requires independence, deep technical expertise, and a strong track record in supporting discovery programs from target identification to candidate selection.

The successful candidate will mentor others, apply advanced computational methods, and collaborate closely with medicinal chemistry to improve potency and developability.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computational Chemistry or related field with 9+ years pharma/biotech experience.
• Proven ability to independently deliver computational work that informs medicinal chemistry decisions.
• Experience with Schrödinger, MOE, and OpenEye.
• Excellent communication skills; ability to collaborate across teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead structure-based drug design meetings with medicinal chemists.
• Support target identification through lead optimization and candidate selection.
• Apply structure-, ligand-, and fragment-based modeling to guide design.
• Use MD, free energy, quantum mechanics, and cheminformatics for design decisions.
• Translate analyses into actionable compound design recommendations.
• Mentor scientists in structure-based drug design across projects.
• Evaluate new computational methods and workflows for value addition.
• Maintain rigor and reproducibility in an industrial drug-discovery setting.

Skills

Structure-based drug design

Molecular dynamics

Free energy calculations

Quantum mechanics

Cheminformatics

Ligand affinity estimation

Machine learning in chemistry

Schrödinger suite

Programming/scripting

Education

PhD in Computational Chemistry or related discipline

Tools

Schrödinger modeling software

MOE

OpenEye

Job description

IDEAYA Biosciences in South San Francisco is seeking a Senior Principal Research Scientist in Computational Chemistry to advance small-molecule drug discovery. The role requires independence, deep technical expertise, and a strong track record in supporting discovery programs from target identification to candidate selection.

The successful candidate will mentor others, apply advanced computational methods, and collaborate closely with medicinal chemistry to improve potency and developability.