Senior Director, Computational Drug Discovery
Apheris
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: Remote • 🇩🇪 Germany
Visit company websiteJob Level
Senior
About the role
- Own scientific direction across modalities, data, and workflows.
- Define which drug discovery problems, modalities, and data types Apheris prioritizes with our product offerings.
- Guide how applications and models should evolve to remain maximally useful to pharma teams.
- Balance scientific ambition with practicality and adoption in customer environments.
- Build and lead an established, growing computational drug discovery team.
- Lead a core team already in place, including a senior medicinal chemist and a forward-deployed scientist.
- Hire and integrate 1–2 additional team members over the next 6–9 months as customer demand scales.
- Set clear scientific direction and execution standards across all customer-facing programs.
- Engage comfortably and credibly with leading computational drug discovery scientists at large pharmaceutical companies.
- Lead deep scientific discussions on program strategy, model application, and decision-making trade-offs.
- Provide authoritative guidance grounded in real-world drug discovery experience.
- Build trust and credibility through publications, talks, and direct engagement with the community.
- Drive hands-on scientific leadership across customer programs.
- Ensure recommendations reflect how discovery programs are actually run, not theoretical workflows.
Requirements
- PhD in computational chemistry, cheminformatics, computational drug discovery, or a closely related field.
- 8+ years of post-PhD industry experience in computational drug discovery or computational chemistry, including proven impact on drug discovery programs from hit finding through lead optimization.
- Deep, practical expertise in structure-based and ligand-based design, ADMET modeling, and integration of experimental and biophysical data.
- Exceptional understanding of modern ML approaches in drug discovery, with sound judgment on where ML materially improves outcomes.
- Strong scientific credibility, demonstrated through prior roles at leading pharma, top-tier biotech, or recognized computational drug discovery technology providers, and a solid publication record.
- Demonstrated experience leading and mentoring computational drug discovery teams.
- Comfortable operating hands-on in a fast-moving, venture-backed, remote-first environment.
- Clear motivation to enable customer drug discovery programs rather than run internal pipelines.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation, including meaningful early-stage virtual share options.
- Generous holiday allowance.
- Great suite of benefits, including a wellbeing budget, mental health benefits, a work-from-home budget, a co-working stipend and a learning and development budget.
- Remote-first working – work where you work best, whether from home or a co-working space near you.
- Office Days at our Berlin HQ or a different European location (3x a year).
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard skills
computational chemistrycheminformaticscomputational drug discoverystructure-based designligand-based designADMET modelingmachine learningbiophysical data integrationdrug discovery program impactlead optimization
Soft skills
scientific leadershipteam leadershipmentoringcommunicationcredibility buildingcustomer engagementstrategic decision-makingtrust buildingadaptabilitymotivation
Certifications
PhD