Senior Automation/Medicinal Chemist in Abingdon

Your work will change lives. Including your own. We are seeking an experienced Senior Scientist in Automation/Medicinal Chemistry to accelerate our internal and partnership drug discovery portfolio. This role, bridging AI-enabled design and cutting-edge automated synthesis, is central to our mission.

Operating our Milton Park site, you will take ownership for delivery of compounds through our state-of-the-art Automation Studio and, by collaborating closely with drug designers, drive impactful outcomes for drug discovery programs within our pipeline. You will have a track record of leadership from the lab, and combine deep medicinal and synthetic chemistry expertise with a commitment to modernizing the drug discovery process. A self-starter who can lead effectively from the bench and operate strategically.

The Team You’ll Join: You’ll join the Milton Park based Chemistry Automation group, a multidisciplinary team of chemists and automation specialists who partner closely with discovery and platform teams across Recursion. The group operates a state-of-the-art Chemistry Automation Platform supported by well-equipped synthesis and spectroscopy laboratories, that combines automated synthesis and purification, high-throughput experimentation, and integrated analytical workflows to deliver high-quality small-molecule synthesis for our discovery portfolio. You will work closely with the drug design groups as part of the wider chemistry function, and be embedded into a program team tasked with advancing internal or partnership drug discovery programs leveraging the Recursion platform.

The Responsibilities You Will Own:

• Design, prioritise, and tactically execute synthetic routes for small‑molecule targets, strategically using our Chemistry Automation Platform, our well-equipped traditional synthesis laboratories and CRO support to meet project goals on tight timelines.
• Build a strong collaborative partnership with computational and medicinal chemists to use the full capabilities of both the Centaur Chemist (design) and Chemistry Automation (synthesis) platforms including optimising methodologies, workflows, and best practices.
• Adapt core synthetic medicinal chemistry tactics onto the automation platform by collaborating with software developers and module owners, validating feasibility, defining safe and scalable conditions, and documenting processes clearly for reuse.
• Act as primary medicinal chemist supporting a drug discovery project accountable for deliverables and ensuring successful outcomes, working with a senior project lead for program‑level strategy.

The Experience You’ll Need:

• Ph.D. in Organic or Medicinal Chemistry, or a BSc/MSc degree with equivalent industry experience. In addition, significant relevant industry experience and evidence of impact.
• Proven ability to design, prioritize, and tactically execute small molecule drug discovery, including expertise in route design, optimising challenging reaction conditions and prosecuting medicinal chemistry with automated synthesis.
• Experience in the application of automation in synthesis in an industrial setting (e.g. use of liquid handling or powder dispensing for library synthesis, HTE for reaction optimisation, flow chemistry) with enthusiasm to work directly with automated systems.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, both written and verbal, with ability to influence and work cross-functionally to ensure alignment on priorities, facilitating collaboration.
• Fluency in modern medicinal and computational chemistry software tools such as workflow builders, basic cheminformatics packages, structure based design and data visualisation tools.

Working Location & Compensation: This is a lab-based role in our Milton Park site. Employees are expected to work on-site 100% of the time, with occasional flexibility. 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 £70,400 to £93,500. 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 decoding biology to radically improve lives. Recursion is advancing a portfolio of differentiated investigational medicines across its wholly owned and partnered pipeline in oncology, rare disease, neuroscience, immunology, and other therapeutic areas with significant unmet need. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, an AI-native, end-to-end drug discovery and development platform integrating biology, chemistry, and clinical development into a unified intelligence system. Powered by proprietary multimodal data, purpose-built AI models, and bilingual teams fluent in both science and AI, the Recursion OS is designed to translate complex science into medicines that matter — faster, better, and at scale — for patients who are waiting. Recursion’s platform infrastructure is anchored in Salt Lake City, Utah and Milton Park, Oxfordshire, where its automated biology and chemistry laboratories generate proprietary data at industrial scale. Recursion also maintains offices in New York, Montréal, and London, three global hubs for talent and leadership at the intersection of AI and scientific innovation.