Description
Anthropic's Life Sciences team is building a research group focused on biological discoveries by combining AI with hands-on biological research. We're seeking research scientists with deep medicinal chemistry expertise to join the team. Our goal is to speed up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude, and this role puts that mission into practice.
You'll be an expert medicinal chemist with hands-on experience designing, synthesizing, purifying, and characterizing small molecules. Above all, you'll close the loop between AI-generated hypotheses and experimental data to share with the community. Working alongside AI researchers and engineers, you'll drive experimental programs end to end and pressure-test AI-designed molecules and AI-proposed synthetic routes against real chemistry.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design multi-step synthetic routes for small molecules and oversee their execution end to end, including route selection, reaction optimization, purification strategy, and interpretation of full characterization data (NMR, LC-MS, HPLC)
- Coordinate synthesis and biological evaluation with external contract research organizations and academic partners
- Evaluate AI-designed molecules and AI-proposed synthetic routes, drive them to experimental readout, and feed results back to research teams
- Apply medicinal chemistry principles, including SAR analysis and physicochemical property optimization, to compound design and prioritization
- Ensure experimental data across programs is high quality and well documented, including procedures, spectra, and failure modes
- Communicate findings clearly to chemistry, AI research, and life sciences audiences
Minimum Qualifications:
- PhD in chemistry
- Demonstrated medicinal chemistry experience, including SAR-driven design and optimization of small molecules, with recent, sustained hands-on synthetic work
- Comfort navigating ambiguity and defining problems in a rapidly evolving research environment
- Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across cross-functional teams, with strong written and verbal communication skills
Preferred Qualifications:
- 5+ years of medicinal chemistry experience beyond the PhD
- Track record of advancing programs from hit identification through lead optimization
- Experience directing synthetic chemistry activities at contract research organizations
- Computational chemistry, cheminformatics, or coding skills, for example Python with RDKit or pandas for data analysis and automation
- Experience using AI or ML tools in the life sciences
- Publications and/or patents demonstrating scientific impact
The annual compensation range for this role is $300,000-$320,000 USD.
We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.