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Salary: USD 300,000 - 320,000 / annual
Anthropic's Life Sciences team is building a research group focused on biological discoveries by combining AI with hands-on biological research. This role seeks a research scientist with deep medicinal chemistry expertise to join the team and help accelerate progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude.
You will be an expert medicinal chemist with hands-on experience designing, synthesizing, purifying, and characterizing small molecules. Your core mission is to close the loop between AI-generated hypotheses and experimental data, validating and pressure-testing AI-designed molecules and AI-proposed synthetic routes against real chemistry.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design multi-step synthetic routes for small molecules and oversee execution end-to-end, including route selection, reaction optimization, purification strategy, and interpretation of 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 with recent hands-on synthetic work, comfort navigating ambiguity in a rapidly evolving research environment, and ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across cross-functional teams.
Preferred qualifications include 5+ years of medicinal chemistry experience beyond PhD, track record advancing programs from hit identification through lead optimization, experience directing synthetic chemistry at contract research organizations, computational chemistry or cheminformatics skills (Python, RDKit, pandas), experience using AI/ML tools in life sciences, and publications or patents demonstrating scientific impact.
This role is fully on-site in the San Francisco Bay Area.
