AD/Senior Principal Scientist – CADD

Key Skills

Aartificial intelligence, Database, Drug Discovery, Effective communication skills, Machine learning techniques

Job Description

The Computer-Aided Drug Discovery (CADD) group in Emeryville is seeking an AD/Senior Principal Scientist to complement our skills and enthusiasm for impacting human health through drug discovery. The Emeryville site uniquely houses the Novartis Institutes for Tropical Diseases that contributes to a pipeline of medicines for major global health challenges including malaria, Chagas disease and pandemic preparedness. Also, as part of the Emeryville Protein Interactomics Center, we contribute to drug discovery and technology developments across all research sites, disease areas, and technology platforms. In all our endeavors, we build on our vast knowledgebase of over 20 million activity measurements, internal proprietary structural database, a global CADD team and the partnership and expertise of over 5,000 scientists with a huge variety of expert skills and a strong dedication to innovation.

At the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), we value your ideas, personal growth and career aspirations. You will have opportunities to explore the power of cutting-edge science and technology (e.g., cryoEM, VR, high performance compute environment) in an environment that truly values multidisciplinary collaborations. We are a highly-regarded research group that values engagement in the wider scientific community. In order to tackle the world’s toughest medical challenges, you will be empowered to take smart risks in an unbossed way, using your creativity and resourcefulness.

The role can be hired as a Senior Principal Scientist or Assoc Dir level, depending on the candidate's experience and will be based out of our Bay Area location (Emeryville), with a hybrid work model (office/home).

Your responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Leverage your CADD expertise to engage and influence multidisciplinary project teams for effective decision-making from target identification through candidate nomination

Participate in strategic level discussions for CADD impact and growth

Mentor within and outside of the CADD group, including those CADD members who directly report to you

Drive compound optimization cycles by participation in rational drug design and synthesis prioritization efforts via advanced scoring methods (active learning and ML model development, free-energy perturbation or alternate scoring method), in multi-objective fashion

Develop, improve and implement efficient computational workflows that can be distributed to our global CADD team

Initiate drug discovery efforts by proposing novel targets / modalities, evaluating target druggability and executing in silico hit generation, triage and expansion methodologies

Diversity & Inclusion / EEO

The Novartis Group of Companies are Equal Opportunity Employers and take pride in maintaining a diverse environment. We do not discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status. We are committed to building diverse teams, representative of the patients and communities we serve, and we strive to create an inclusive workplace that cultivates bold innovation through collaboration and empowers our people to unleash their full potential.

Minimum Requirements

What you’ll bring to the role:

Senior Principal Scientist:

PhD in computational chemistry, computational biology, computational chemical biology, or related field

7+ years of pharmaceutical industry experience applying computational methods to drug discovery and small molecule design as a member of therapeutic project teams

3+ years of experience in a supervisory role and mentoring CADD team members

Ability to work comfortably as an individual contributor as well as supervisor

Expert proficiency in one or more commercial drug discovery platform such as ICM, Schrödinger, CCG and/or OpenEye

Extensive expertise in medicinal chemistry principles, cheminformatics, ADME, ML/AI and structure-based drug discovery

Excellent interpersonal, organizational and communication (written and verbal) skills

Assoc Director:

1. 10+ years industry experience in CADD
2. 5+ years personnel supervision and mentoring experience
3. Experience with strategic planning and guidance for CADD team needs such as software platform and skills growth and development

Why consider Novartis?

We believe the answers are found when curious, courageous and collaborative people like you are brought together in an inspiring environment—where you’re given opportunities to explore the power of digital and data, and where you’re surrounded by people who share your determination to tackle the world’s toughest medical challenges.

We are Novartis. Join us and help us reimagine medicine.

Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: Novartis is committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams, representative of the patients and communities we serve.

Accessibility and Reasonable Accommodations: Individuals in need of a reasonable accommodation due to a medical condition or disability for any part of the application process, or to perform the essential functions of a position, please send an e-mail to tas.nacomms@novartis.com or call +1 (877)395-2339 and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Please include the job requisition number in your message.

The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $174,000 - $261,000/ year; however, while salary ranges are effective from 1/1/22 through 12/31/22, fluctuations in the job market may necessitate adjustments to pay ranges during this period.