Machine Learning Engineer (Cheminformatics/Bioinformatics)

About Ignota Labs

Ignota Labs is a multi-award-winning drug turnaround company tackling one of the industry’s biggest bottlenecks: drug safety. Through cutting-edge explainable AI, we identify and resolve toxicity issues in promising drug candidates, unlocking their potential to become safe, effective therapies.

At Ignota Labs, you’ll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI, real-world drug development and business innovation. Our mission is ambitious, and we’re building a team of equally ambitious, experienced and forward-thinking experts who are excited by the opportunities recent innovation in AI and technology can bring. This is not just relevant for drug development, but also for running the organisation in a more efficient way, allowing experts to automate the small, repetitive tasks and become 10 times more productive.

Ignota Labs are venture capital backed and have recently closed a substantial Seed round with leading Silicon Valley investors.

About The Role

As a machine learning engineer (Cheminformatics/Bioinformatics) in drug discovery at Ignota Labs, you will be applying your skills in developing methods to predict and understand on- and off-target toxicity for novel drugs. We apply both cheminformatics and bioinformatics to produce a holistic view of a failed drug and a plan for turning it around. Whether your base is in bioinformatics or cheminformatics, you can expect to learn plenty about both and apply it in this fast-moving, cutting-edge role.

What Makes This Role Unique

• Applied: We at Ignota Labs are at the cutting edge of drug discovery by turning around drugs with known safety problems. The results of your research into toxicology will have real and immediate impact.
• Multi-disciplinary: You’ll be working with a small team of incredibly talented individuals from across the full drug development life cycle, allowing you to gain an understanding of the whole end-to-end process.
• Dynamic: Ignota is a fast-paced, dynamic environment where you can expect every day to be different from the rest.
• Innovative: You’ll be working with state-of-the-art AI methods, pushing the boundaries of how machine learning can be applied to real-world drug discovery challenges.

What You’ll Do

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop hypotheses for mechanisms of drug toxicity.
• Build cutting-edge machine learning models to predict mechanisms of toxicity.
• Stay informed about advancements in relevant scientific research and apply this knowledge to your work.
• Find ways to streamline and improve Ignota’s drug turnaround platform.
• Build pipelines for processing and interpreting biological data (in particular transcriptomics and genomics).
• Build data processing pipelines, integrating different public and proprietary sources.
• Use data visualisation to convey findings to team members and collaborators.

Who You Are

• Mission-oriented: You want to help patients by bringing previously failed drugs to market.
• Bias for action: This is a fast-moving startup environment. You want to get things done and we want to empower you to do them.
• Fast learner: You can quickly absorb new concepts, whether it’s a new technology, scientific domain, or methodology.
• Collaborative: You work well with interdisciplinary teams and appreciate different perspectives.
• Curious & Versatile: You don’t see yourself in a box – you have a natural desire to expand your expertise across multiple domains, whether it’s AI, drug discovery, chemistry, or biology. You thrive at the intersection of disciplines and are eager to connect the dots between them.

Requirements

What You’ll Bring

A strong candidate will have/be most of the following:

• Educated to PhD level in either Cheminformatics or Bioinformatics, or equivalent experience (3+ years).
• A strong background in cheminformatics or bioinformatics (or both), ability to analyse chemical or biological data and experience building and developing predictive algorithms.
• Strong programming skills and understanding of modern software development practices in at least one language, ideally including Python.

We encourage applicants to apply if they are excited by the role, even if they don’t have all the above, especially if they have some of the following:

Nice to have

• If you have experience in bioinformatics, familiarity with chemical representations and cheminformatics concepts is a plus.
• If you have experience in cheminformatics, familiarity with high-dimensional biological datasets (e.g., gene expression) and bioinformatics tools is a plus.
• Experience with professional software development using best practices including version control and code reviews (we use github for both).
• Experience working with chemical data and or chemistry software (eg. RDKit).
• Knowledge and use of applied toxicology, toxicity-testing methodologies, dose-response analysis, and safety risk assessment.
• Knowledge of cloud computing, HPCs.
• Experience with Sklearn, Torch, Pandas.
• Experience creating visualisations in Python.
• Solid understanding of toxicology principles and mechanisms and deep understanding of predictive biology.
• Experience with bash scripting and command line tools.
• Experience in biology and/or drug discovery and ideally applying computational methods to analyse complex biological data (multi-omics, transcriptomics, GWAS).

Benefits

What We Offer

• A competitive salary (c. £50-60K depending on experience), performance-based bonus, pension and significant equity in a high-growth startup.
• Opportunities for rapid career growth and progression.
• A collaborative, flexible, hybrid working environment with remote options and tools to support seamless communication.
• Vitality health insurance, including mental health, dental, and optical care.
• The chance to bring potentially life-saving drugs back to patients – helping improve the lives of millions.

Seniority level

Entry level

Employment type

Full-time

Job function

Research

Industries

IT Services and IT Consulting

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