Medicinal Chemist

Hybrid$220k – $300k

About this role

About us

Edison Scientific builds and deploys AI scientist agents to accelerate science and the development of new medicines. We are an ambitious team run by scientists and engineers from leading institutions across biology, physics, chemistry, and AI.

Role

We're looking for a Medicinal Chemist to join our Forward Deployed team, embedded directly with pharma and biotech partners alongside our engineers and computational biologists. Your job: make sure our AI agents produce chemistry that's credible, synthesizable, and useful to real drug discovery teams.

You'll build benchmarks, evaluate agent outputs, and work with our medicinal chemist partners, to find where AI creates the most value in their design, synthesis, testing, and analysis cycles.

This is onsite, hands on work. You'll build relationships with discovery leaders, translate their chemistry thinking into agent behavior, and feed insights back to our AI team to improve how our platform reasons about molecular design.

Responsibilities

  • Improve AI agent performance to hit-to-lead chemistry tasks including SAR analysis, structure-based design, and synthetic feasibility analysis

  • Design benchmarks and acceptance criteria for chemistry focused agent workflows

  • Partner with medicinal chemists at client organizations to integrate AI agents into their discovery workflows

  • Serve as the chemistry expert on AI generated outputs, assessing structural soundness, flagging failure modes, and determining what's actionable

  • Collaborate daily with Forward Deployed Engineers and Computational Biologists on each account

  • Support engagement scoping, success metrics, and technical evaluation with our go-to-market team members.

Requirements

  • Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, or a related field and 5+ years of industry experience, ideally within a pharma or biotech sponsor organization

  • Track record in lead optimization campaigns from hit identification through candidate nomination

  • Deep knowledge of cheminformatics tools such as RDKit, Schrödinger, or MOE

  • Experience integrating ADMET and DMPK data into design decisions

  • Ability to travel domestically 20-40% of the time

Nice to Have

  • Proficiency in Python

  • Experience working across multiple therapeutic areas

  • High comfort with ambiguity and fast iteration

Why join us?

We're a fast-moving, mission-driven culture where smart people do their best work and actually enjoy doing it. We also offer full-time employees the following:

  • Competitive salary and equity

  • Full healthcare coverage; we pay 100% of premiums for you and your dependents

  • Support for growing families, including a yearly new parent stipend and fertility coverage through Carrot

  • Mental health support through Rula, our in-network therapist and psychiatrist network with fast availability

  • 12 weeks of paid parental leave for maternity, paternity, and adoption

  • Pet care support with a yearly employer-funded stipend for your animal companions

  • Commuter benefits so you can pay for transit and parking with pre-tax dollars

  • 401(k) company matching

  • $300 health and wellness benefit quarterly

  • Lunch is on us every day you're in the office, and dinner is on us when you're working late

  • Regular team off-sites and company events

Edison Scientific is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.

Company at a glance

Edison Scientific, spun out from FutureHouse in 2025, focuses on building and commercializing AI agents for science. The company shares FutureHouse’s mission to create an AI Scientist, scaling autonomous research and applying it to drug development. It aims to accelerate discovery across the sciences by enabling more rapid and scalable scientific exploration. In short, Edison Scientific positions itself at the forefront of AI-driven scientific automation and drug development.

Founded2025
Team Size11-50
WorkspaceHybrid
IndustryAI/ML
Location
United States

Top Benefits

  • Competitive salary
  • Equity
  • Full healthcare coverage
  • New parent stipend
  • Fertility coverage
  • Mental health support
  • Paid parental leave
  • Pet care support
  • Commuter benefits
  • 401(k) company matching
  • Health and wellness benefit
  • Daily lunch
  • Dinner for late work
  • Team off-sites

Tired of cold applications?

Sign up with Clera and we'll reach out the moment a role actually fits you — no more spraying applications into the void.

Know someone who'd be great for this?