Senior Director, Computational Drug Discovery

Apheris is seeking a Senior Director, Computational Drug Discovery to build and lead a small, high-impact computational drug discovery team and to serve as a peer-level scientific counterpart to senior computational chemistry and drug discovery leaders at the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies.

Requirements

• PhD in computational chemistry, cheminformatics, computational drug discovery, or a closely related field.
• 8+ years of post-PhD industry experience in computational drug discovery or computational chemistry, including proven impact on drug discovery programs from hit finding through lead optimization.
• Strong practical understanding of structure-based and ligand-based design, ADMET modelling, and integration of experimental and biophysical data in real drug programs.
• Solid understanding of modern ML approaches in drug discovery, with sound judgment on where ML materially improves outcomes.
• Strong scientific credibility, demonstrated through prior roles at leading pharma, top-tier biotech, or recognized computational drug discovery technology providers, and ideally a solid publication record.
• Demonstrated experience leading and mentoring computational drug discovery teams.
• Comfortable operating hands-on in a fast-moving, venture-backed, remote-first environment.
• Clear motivation to enable customer drug discovery programs rather than run internal pipelines.

Benefits

• Direct collaboration with world-leading computational drug discovery scientists across major pharmaceutical companies.
• A leadership role with real influence on company direction, scientific priorities, and product strategy, working closely with the founders.
• Regular interaction with our Scientific Advisory Board and external experts at the forefront of the field.
• The opportunity to build and scale the computational drug discovery function from the ground up.
• Competitive compensation, including meaningful early-stage virtual share options.
• Generous holiday allowance
• Great suite of benefits, including a wellbeing budget, mental health benefits, a work-from-home budget, a co-working stipend and a learning and development budget
• Remote-first working – work where you work best, whether from home or a co-working space near you
• Office Days at our Berlin HQ or a different European location (3x a year)