Medicinal Chemist

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

• A 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

• A 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