About the role
We are looking for a Junior R&D Researcher to join our R&D team. The team develops and benchmarks the computational technologies behind our discovery platforms, including protein-peptide complex modeling, binding affinity prediction, and ADMET and permeability prediction. You will contribute to these projects under the guidance of senior scientists.
Key responsibilities
- Develop computational pipelines, methods, and models for R&D technologies under the supervision of a senior scientist.
- Review published methods and open-source tools for each task and assess their fit for the use case.
- Adapt existing technologies to our needs, including changes to their source code.
- Collect and curate datasets from public databases and the scientific literature, and build benchmarks to evaluate methods against baselines.
- Document methods, benchmark results, and user guides for the drug discovery and software teams.
- Present progress and results at regular R&D reviews.
Required Qualifications
- Higher education in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, biophysics, bioinformatics, or a related field.
- Candidates who have not yet completed their degree are also considered if they meet most of the other requirements.
- Strong background in biology and chemistry:
- Protein structure across all levels of organization, conformational flexibility, and structure-function relationships.
- Non-covalent interactions (hydrogen bonds, electrostatic, hydrophobic, π-stacking), covalent binding, and binding thermodynamics.
- Stereochemistry, protonation and tautomeric states, and physicochemical properties of small molecules and peptides.
- Programming experience in Python: functions, classes, and data structures; conventional libraries for Data Analysis and visualization (Pandas, Numpy, etc.); Conda environments.
- Basic knowledge of machine learning: training, validation, and test splits; standard metrics (ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, RMSE).
- Experience with RDKit, Biotite, or Open Babel, and with structure file formats (PDB, mmCIF, SDF, MOL2).
- Basic experience with Linux and Git.
- Working proficiency in written and spoken English: the ability to write about scientific topics, and to discuss them and make decisions with an international team.
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with molecular docking (for example AutoDock Vina, Glide, GOLD, or HADDOCK) and an understanding of docking types (rigid and flexible, physics-based and ML-based).
- Experience with other structure-based design methods: structure prediction (AlphaFold, Boltz), binding-site detection, pharmacophore analysis.
- Experience with molecular dynamics simulations (for example GROMACS, AMBER, or OpenMM).
- Experience with molecular visualization tools (PyMOL, ChimeraX, or VMD).
- Experience with PyTorch on GPU, or knowledge of graph neural networks or Transformers.
- A thesis, research internship, hackathon, or personal project in computational drug discovery. A pipeline that you assembled yourself is a strong plus.
- Experience running computations on remote machines, cloud platforms, or HPC.
What we offer
- Work on real R&D projects in drug discovery, with mentoring from senior scientists.
- Your technologies will be used in drug discovery programs of major pharmaceutical companies.
- Daily work at the intersection of structural biology, chemistry, and machine learning.
- Remote work with flexible collaboration.
- Professional growth in a fast-moving scientific field.
We're looking for someone who is:
- Curiosity and initiative in research tasks.
- Reliability: you respect deadlines, meetings, and other people's time.
- Honesty, transparency, and openness to feedback.
- Clear communication: you ask immediately when something is unclear.

