Director, Computational Biology & Drug Discovery (ML) in London

The Team You’ll Join

You'll report through our data science organisation, an interdisciplinary group powered by machine learning and inference-based discovery of drug programs from first principles. Your team will initially consist of ~6 computational biologists and engineers, but may evolve over time. Close collaboration between computational biologists across multiple therapeutic areas (primarily oncology) and with data scientists on the core build teams will provide a strong network of feedback and support in setting timelines, refining ideas, automating repetitive workflows, piloting, productionalizing and more. You will collaborate extensively with data scientists, chemists, engineers, commercial strategists, and biologists throughout the organisation to advance milestones and provide insights to further advance Recursion’s capabilities.

Essential attributes to this role include a bold, execution-first attitude and passion for deploying rigorous science to bring life-changing therapies to patients.

The Experience You’ll Need

• PhD in a relevant field (computational biology, bioinformatics, statistics, quantitative pharmacology, cancer/cell biology, etc.) with 5+ years of experience applying professional competencies to fundamental problems in oncology or drug discovery.
• Leadership experience managing cross-functional teams of 5+ people and a passion for growing diverse talent through mentorship, sponsorship and advocacy. Individuals with experience in software engineering and/or managing engineers will be given preference.
• Experience applying computational methods (including probabilistic, statistical, and/or machine learning techniques) to analyse complex biological and/or human clinical data.
• Fluency and experience working with high-level programming languages for complex data analysis (Python strongly preferred).
• General understanding of small molecule drug discovery and pharmacology.
• A passion for acting boldly in highly collaborative, cross-functional teams to identify and answer killer questions.
• Ability to clearly explain computational analyses and methodologies through compelling visualisations, documentation and presentations to stakeholders and non-technical teams.

Nice To Have:

• Experience designing high-throughput experiments to address biological questions, either on your own or in collaboration with bench scientists.
• Experience analysing data from imaging- and/or genomics-based modalities.
• Experience evaluating and prioritising compounds during SAR and lead optimization cycles.

How You’ll be Supported

• Peer mentor for onboarding during the first 90 days.
• Training on Recursion’s culture and values and our drug discovery & development processes to provide insight to our unique approach and strategy for success.
• Regular 1:1s with supervisor and colleagues provide opportunities for support and feedback.
• Support to attend conferences and workshops at least once a year.
• Leadership and mentorship training and coaching from internal and third-party sources.
• A generous benefits package and perks like lunch stipends.

The Values That We Hope You Share:

• We Care: We care about our drug candidates, our Recursionauts, their families, each other, our communities, the patients we aim to serve and their loved ones. We also care about our work.
• We Learn: Learning from the diverse perspectives of our fellow Recursionauts, and from failure, is an essential part of how we make progress.
• We Deliver: We are unapologetic that our expectations for delivery are extraordinarily high. There is urgency to our existence: we sprint at maximum engagement, making time and space to recover.
• Act Boldly with Integrity: No company changes the world or reinvents an industry without being bold. It must be balanced; not by timidity, but by doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
• We are One Recursion: We operate with a 'company first, team second' mentality. Our success comes from working as one interdisciplinary team.

Recursion spends time and energy connecting every aspect of work to these values. They aren’t static, but regularly discussed and questioned because we make decisions rooted in those values in our day-to-day work.

More About Recursion

Recursion is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands 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 London, Toronto, Montreal and the San Francisco Bay Area.