Lead Cheminformatics Engineer

Job Title: Lead Cheminformatics Engineer

Career Level: E

Introduction to role:

Are you ready to redefine an industry and change lives? In Early Science, we have a team of highly skilled scientists generating ideas and performing experiments that support complex drug discovery projects. Our environment flourishes with scientific and technical innovation, with diverse workflows, data, vendor solutions, and in-house builds. As a Lead Cheminformatics Engineer, you'll work alongside Computational and Medicinal Chemists, Software and Data Engineers, Architects, and Analysts to design and implement scientific solutions end-to-end. Your scientific knowledge and technical acuity will be essential in solving and providing innovative solutions, ensuring smooth experiences for our scientists and software development team. Your work will directly impact the science we do, enabling our scientists to undertake groundbreaking research that is not possible today. Are you ready to make the impossible possible?

Accountabilities:

Join our distributed team of cheminformaticians, scientific software engineers, and devops engineers in our Augmented-DMTA platform. Here's what you'll do:

• Be a domain expert with knowledge of cheminformatics and computational chemistry tools used in drug discovery.

• Work with ground breaking technology stacks in a cloud environment to solve scientific challenges for drug discovery.

• Design and implement scientific software and data solutions to enhance the ease, learning, delivery speed, and quality across all therapeutic areas.

• Create novel products and features to address long-standing problems in drug discovery, focusing on producing exceptional user experiences.

• Collaborate with product, design, data science, software engineering, and scientists to build ground breaking experiences and services.

• Propose and implement changes to our drug discovery data models, core architecture, and codebase.

• Develop all levels of the technical stack with a strong focus on scalable backend services.

• Help less experienced software engineers through mentoring and feedback.

• Proactively review and improve the scalability, reliability, performance, and availability of drug discovery services.

• Advocate for meticulous engineering practices: code reviews, automated testing, logging, monitoring, alerting, etc.

• Stay on top of tech trends, experiment with new technologies, participate in technology communities, and mentor other engineering community members.

• Propose engineering solutions for scientific problems using critical thinking and analysis skills.

Essential Skills/Experience:

The role requires senior-level technical skills, and we consider the below essential capabilities:

• Expertise in Cheminformatics, ML, or a related field and experience working with one of the cheminformatics toolkits.

• Expertise in one or more languages like Python, Java, Node.js with the willingness and ability to quickly adapt to a new language.

• Some experience with end-to-end web development with at least one of the web frameworks: FastAPI, Flask, Spring, Django, etc.

• Experience working with relational and/or NoSQL databases and knowledge of query optimization techniques.

• Proficiency in Linux environments.

• Demonstrable abilities with coding standard methodologies including testing, code review, and version control.

• Excellent teamwork, verbal, and written communication skills.

Desirable Skills/Experience:

The following skills would be advantageous for your application but are not considered crucial:

• CI/CD experience with some automation tooling like Jenkins, TravisCI, Github actions, etc.

• Demonstrable high proficiency in data structures and design patterns.

• Experience in chemistry data standardization, transformation, and harmonization combining multiple data sources.

• Experience in cloud services and tools.

• Experience with data and/or compute pipelining tools either generic or cheminformatics-specific ones.

• Basic understanding of Machine Learning concepts and MLOps.

• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.

• Experience with GitOps.

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.

At AstraZeneca, you'll be part of a dynamic environment where innovation is at the forefront. Our work has a direct impact on patients by transforming our ability to develop life-changing medicines. We empower the business to perform at its peak by combining ground breaking science with leading digital technology platforms and data. With a passion for impacting lives through data analytics, AI, machine learning, and more, you'll join us at a crucial stage of our journey to become a digital and data-led enterprise. Here you can design your own path while being supported all the way. It's a place for lifelong learning where everything we do matters.

Ready to take ownership and lead? Apply now to join us on this exciting journey!

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.