Principal ML Engineer - Drug Discovery AI Leader

Placements24; Rustenburg; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Medical insurance

Retirement plan

Learning opportunities

Job summary

Placements24 in Rustenburg, North West, invites a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to lead AI initiatives for drug discovery. You will architect and deploy ML models addressing molecular properties, bioactivity, and synthesis pathway design in a research-driven environment.

The role requires deep ML theory and hands-on production experience, collaboration with computational chemists, and mentoring of juniors.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in a quantitative field with strong ML foundation.
• 7+ years in ML engineering applying ML to scientific problems.
• Experience building and deploying ML models in production.
• Proficiency in Python and ML libraries; CI/CD and data pipelines knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and deployment of ML models for drug discovery.
• Develop models for molecular properties, bioactivity, ADMET.
• Use TensorFlow/PyTorch and cheminformatics tools like RDKit.
• Build robust data pipelines for large chemical/biological datasets.
• Collaborate with chemists and medicinal chemists; mentor juniors.
• Deploy models to production; ensure scalability and reliability.
• Stay updated with ML and cheminformatics research; document findings.

Skills

ML expertise

Deep learning

Python

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Scikit-learn

Keras

Cloud AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/ML/Computational Chemistry

Tools

RDKit

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Azure

Job description

Placements24 in Rustenburg, North West, invites a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to lead AI initiatives for drug discovery. You will architect and deploy ML models addressing molecular properties, bioactivity, and synthesis pathway design in a research-driven environment.

The role requires deep ML theory and hands-on production experience, collaboration with computational chemists, and mentoring of juniors.