Senior Computational Chemist: Drug Discovery & Modeling

Placements24; Benoni; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Retirement savings plan with company 1

Generous paid time off

Professional development opportunities

Access to HPC clusters

Job summary

Placements24 in Benoni, South Africa, seeks a Senior Computational Chemist to join a leading pharmaceutical R&D team. You will design and execute in silico experiments to drive drug discovery and lead optimization.

Collaborate with medicinal chemists, biologists, and pharmacologists to prioritize candidates, analyze SAR, and build computational workflows. Strong scripting and HPC experience are highly valued.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computational Chemistry, Cheminformatics, Organic Chemistry or related field.
• 5+ years post-doctoral or industry experience in computational chemistry for drug discovery.
• Expertise in molecular modeling, docking, dynamics, and QM calculations.
• Proficiency with Schrödinger, MOE, GROMACS, AMBER, Gaussian.
• Strong knowledge of cheminformatics with RDKit/KNIME/PubChem.
• Experience with SAR analysis and scripting (Python) is desirable.

Responsibilities

• Perform molecular modeling, virtual screening, and MD simulations to support programs.
• Utilize cheminformatics tools for property prediction, lead optimization, SAR analysis.
• Design and interpret in silico experiments to guide synthesis and validation.
• Collaborate with medicinal chemists to prioritize drug candidates.
• Work with biologists/pharmacologists to understand targets and MOA.
• Develop new computational workflows to boost research efficiency.
• Analyze and report results to project teams and management.
• Stay updated on advances in computational chemistry and drug discovery.
• Contribute to literature and present findings at conferences.

Skills

Molecular modeling

Docking

Molecular dynamics

Quantum mechanics

Python

SAR analysis

Education

PhD in Computational Chemistry or related field

Tools

Schrödinger Suite

MOE

GROMACS

AMBER

Gaussian

RDKit

KNIME

PubChem

Job description

Placements24 in Benoni, South Africa, seeks a Senior Computational Chemist to join a leading pharmaceutical R&D team. You will design and execute in silico experiments to drive drug discovery and lead optimization.

Collaborate with medicinal chemists, biologists, and pharmacologists to prioritize candidates, analyze SAR, and build computational workflows. Strong scripting and HPC experience are highly valued.