Scientist II/Senior Scientist, Computational Chemistry, Drug Discovery at Lila Sciences | California, United States | Rezi

Scientist II/Senior Scientist, Computational Chemistry, Drug Discovery at Lila Sciences

Scientist II/Senior Scientist, Computational Chemistry, Drug Discovery

Lila Sciences · California, United States

Today

Scientist II/Senior Scientist, Computational Chemistry, Drug Discovery

Lila Sciences · California, United States

8 hours ago
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About the Role

Lila Sciences is seeking a Scientist, Computational Chemistry, Drug Discovery to guide, evaluate, and improve AI-driven drug discovery workflows. This role involves ensuring AI-generated plans and prioritizations are scientifically sound and contributing directly to drug discovery programs when computational chemistry leadership is needed. The position focuses on making agent-guided discovery scientifically useful and spans various computational chemistry tasks, including the design and supervision of tools for agentic workflows.

Responsibilities

  • Monitor and review drug discovery agents' computational chemistry workflows, recommendations, and optimization plans for scientific and chemical validity.
  • Evaluate agent-generated drug discovery plans for scientific coherence.
  • Advise on compound prioritization across discovery programs, considering various tradeoffs.
  • Define which computational chemistry tools agents should use, their inputs, and output interpretation.
  • Lead computational chemistry strategy for live drug discovery programs when needed.
  • Build, adapt, or guide the creation of open-source-first workflows for various computational chemistry tasks.
  • Apply protein-ligand binding modeling to support hypothesis generation, compound design, and prioritization.
  • Partner with cross-functional teams to improve AI-assisted discovery loops.
  • Evaluate agent-generated molecular design ideas and identify weaknesses.
  • Help establish validation standards, review protocols, and guardrails for computational chemistry tools used by AI systems.
  • Translate computational chemistry judgment into practical requirements for agent tools, workflows, benchmarks, and decision criteria.

Requirements

  • PhD or equivalent experience in computational chemistry, chemistry, cheminformatics, molecular modeling, biophysics, or a related field.
  • Strong practical experience applying computational chemistry in a drug discovery context, including active program support or leadership.
  • Demonstrated history of modeling protein-ligand binding and using those models to inform discovery decisions.
  • Working knowledge across docking, virtual screening, SAR modeling, conformer generation, pharmacophore modeling, QSAR, ADMET or property prediction, and cheminformatics.
  • Strong medicinal chemistry experience and the ability to reason about compound optimization, SAR, developability, and synthetic or experimental tradeoffs.
  • Fluency in Python and hands-on experience building open-source computational chemistry workflows with libraries such as RDKit, Biopython, OpenMM, MDAnalysis, or comparable tools.
  • Ability to evaluate computational recommendations critically and communicate uncertainty, assumptions, and limitations clearly.
  • Comfort working alongside AI systems, including reviewing, guiding, and improving agent-generated plans.
  • Strong collaboration skills across chemistry, biology, ML, computational science, and engineering teams.

Skills

  • Computational Chemistry
  • Drug Discovery
  • AI-driven workflows
  • Compound prioritization
  • Modeling workflows
  • Docking
  • Virtual screening
  • SAR modeling
  • Molecular property prediction
  • Medicinal chemistry support
  • Live program support
  • Python
  • RDKit
  • Biopython
  • OpenMM
  • MDAnalysis
  • Protein-ligand binding modeling
  • Cheminformatics
  • FEP
  • MM/GBSA
  • Molecular dynamics

Location

  • U.S.

Work Type

  • Full-time

Experience Level

  • PhD or equivalent experience
  • Strong practical experience
  • Demonstrated history
  • Working knowledge
  • Strong medicinal chemistry experience
  • Hands-on experience
  • Comfort working alongside AI systems
  • Strong collaboration skills
  • Industry drug discovery experience (bonus)
  • Experience extending, integrating, or contributing to open-source scientific software (bonus)
  • Experience with FEP, MM/GBSA, molecular dynamics, or other physics-based scoring workflows (bonus)
  • Experience integrating computational chemistry workflows into automated or agentic systems (bonus)
  • Exposure to DEL, high-throughput screening, or other large experimental datasets (bonus)
  • Experience with prospective compound prioritization in active discovery programs (bonus)

Education Level

  • PhD or equivalent experience in computational chemistry, chemistry, cheminformatics, molecular modeling, biophysics, or a related field.

Salary/Compensations

  • $140,800—$217,800 USD

Benefits

  • Competitive base compensation with bonus potential
  • Generous early-stage equity
  • Medical, dental, and vision coverage
  • Employer-paid life and disability insurance
  • Flexible time off with generous company wide holidays
  • Paid parental leave
  • Educational assistance program
  • Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office based employees
  • Company subsidized lunch program
  • Comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region (International)

About the Company

  • Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges.
  • We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI.
  • LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.
  • LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy.
  • Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance.

Equal Opportunity

  • Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.