Overview

Join to apply for the Senior Cheminformatics Research Scientist role at Recursion.

At Recursion, our mission is to transform drug discovery through a powerful synthesis of AI, automation, and deep scientific expertise. Cheminformatics is the backbone of our predictive and generative modeling capabilities, and our technology platforms are the engine driving drug discovery programmes with unparalleled speed and efficiency.

We are looking for a talented Senior Cheminformatics Research Scientist to be at the forefront of this mission. You will be instrumental in developing the scientifically intelligent automations that form our core discovery platform. Working with top-tier teams of drug designers, domain experts, and software engineers, you will design and implement the systems that power our programs. This is a unique opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI-driven drug design and see the capabilities you build have a direct and immediate impact on discovering new medicines.

Responsibilities

• Use your technical foundation to make significant code contributions and collaborate across disciplines.
• Ideate and develop new approaches to transform our core Hit Identification, Hit to Lead and Lead Optimisation processes by translating insights from drug designers and collaborating with domain experts in AI, Informatics, and Physics-based Modelling to build novel workflows.
• Develop and maintain the core cheminformatics capabilities and libraries routinely used by our drug designers.
• Collaborate with AI Research Engineers to enhance our generative approaches to molecule design.
• Collaborate within interdisciplinary drug discovery teams to advance pharmaceutical programmes.
• Contribute to the design of AI/data science methods to expedite the Design-Make-Test-Analyze discovery cycle.
• Lead the development of production-grade toolkits and libraries at the intersection of cheminformatics, computational chemistry, structural bioinformatics and artificial intelligence to continuously improve the productivity and capabilities of our drug discovery processes.
• Define research and development priorities in the cheminformatics space including robust timelines and deliverables.
• Collaborate with research scientists, medicinal chemists and computational drug designers to translate their requirements into algorithmic improvements and new capabilities.
• Work with software engineers to implement these algorithms into our core technology platform.
• Promote new methods through effective communication with stakeholders, training sessions and supporting users directly with their coding tasks.
• Stay at the frontier of new technology developments, analyze them for potential benefits to our platform and devise plans for their implementation.
• Be an external advocate for the company within the cheminformatics community.

The Team You’ll Join

You will be an essential member of the Recursion Digital Chemistry team. The Digital Chemistry Team is an empowered, execution-minded group of drug discovery professionals responsible for translating Recursion's innovative science to patients through hit identification and lead optimization activities. Our desire to make a difference and contribute to our mission of decoding biology to radically improve lives drives everything we do. In your role, you will collaborate cross-functionally within the Chemistry, Biology and Data Science teams to ensure successful planning and execution of discovery operations.

Experience You’ll Need

• Degree in chemistry, cheminformatics, structural bioinformatics or a related field, or a degree in computer science with chemistry knowledge stemming from extensive professional experience.
• Sufficient knowledge in medicinal chemistry to understand drug design and how computational methods are applied in the process from hit discovery to lead optimization.
• Hands-on experience developing and deploying scientific software or toolkits that were successfully used to solve drug discovery problems.
• Strong expertise in Python, with the programming skills to implement data structures and complex algorithms using numerical and computational chemistry toolkits (e.g., RDKit, OpenEye).
• Software development experience to confidently design and implement modules, packages, applications and APIs. Familiarity with CI/CD practices and the deployment of containerised applications.
• Hands-on experience with best software development practices and particularly in a collaborative environment. Increasing the scalability of computational methods through deployments on cloud computing platforms such as AWS, GCP or Azure.

Beneficial Skills and Experience

• Keen interest in artificial intelligence and its application to drug discovery.
• Understanding of ligand- and structure-based drug design.
• Experience with machine learning and major machine learning frameworks such as scikit-learn or PyTorch.
• Proficiency in a low-level programming language such as C/C++ or Rust.
• Knowledge of advanced data analysis techniques such as multi-parameter optimization.
• Open source contributions or publications in academic journals demonstrating experience in scientific method development and innovation.

Working Location & Compensation

This is an office-based, hybrid position at our office in London, England. Employees are expected to work in the office at least 50% of the time. At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is £86,300 - £115,500 GBP. You will also be eligible for an annual bonus and equity compensation, as well as a comprehensive benefits package.

The Values We Hope You Share

• We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
• We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
• We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
• We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
• We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
• We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.

Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.

More About Recursion

Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to radically improve lives. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously generate one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montréal, New York, London, Oxford area, and the San Francisco Bay area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation.