Senior Director of Data Science, Drug Discovery

Recursion is the clinical-stage biotechnology company industrializing drug discovery by decoding biology. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset the Recursion Map, a collection of hundreds of billions of searchable inferences across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. 

Recursion’s creed -- to build a map of biology and follow this map to discover treatments to serve patients -- relies on our unique combination of high-throughput and high-dimensional biological experimentation with deep computational modeling to discover therapeutic starting points and rapidly progress them to the clinic. 

The Recursion Map of Biology is a unique platform integrating genome-scale reverse genetics and chemical profiling -- with over 1 million unique biological perturbations profiled -- in a high-dimensional, uniform biological assay to predict tens of billions of relationships between biological perturbations and therapeutic candidates. The Senior Director, Drug Discovery position offers a unique opportunity to develop, guide, and implement the strategy to weave computation through the drug discovery process, from program ideation and initial hit selection in the Recursion Map, through molecular optimization, and culminating in transition to IND-enabling studies.

The Impact You’ll Make

In this role, you, your team, and your colleagues will:

• Develop Recursion’s computational roadmap for search of our chemical-genetic Maps to identify efficacious starting points against both monogenic and complex disease; for target and mechanism-of-action deconvolution and chemical optimization in our high-dimensional phenotypic space; and for biomarker discovery to rapidly transition molecules to the clinic.
• Manage and Guide teams in executing the above strategy to turn maps into medicines. 
• Collaborate with other leaders in discovery biology, chemistry, and data science to deliver therapeutic programs to the clinic and to industrialize the process of doing so with machine-learning driven optimization of each stage.

This is a drug discovery-focused role and candidates are expected to be experienced in industrial drug discovery specifically. Experience in clinical development, post-marketing data science, or data analytics and infrastructure are valuable but not independently qualifying.

The Team You’ll Join

As Senior Director of Data Science, Drug Discovery, you will report to the VP, Data Science and lead our computational drug discovery efforts. You will collaborate with peer leaders in data science, biology, chemistry, and engineering to drive both present execution and future industrialization in both Recursion’s core therapeutic areas of oncology, neuroscience, fibrosis and future areas. You will lead teams focused in each therapeutic area, as well as application-focused teams bringing together innovations across therapeutic areas in service of Recursions high-level goals and long-term vision.

The Experience You'll Need

• 7+ years applying professional competencies to fundamental problems of relevance to drug discovery, specifically in a biopharma industry setting.
• Experience as a member or leader on multiple active discovery/preclinical candidate program teams, collaborating with leads in biology and chemistry.
• Experience hiring, managing, and mentoring teams engaged in drug discovery activities in a matrixed environment. 
• A vision for transforming drug discovery, from target/model identification through screening, hit to lead, and lead-optimization with the use of computational modeling and machine learning.
• Curiosity and the professional skill-set to excel in an open, highly collaborative, and growth-oriented environment.

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The Values That We Hope You Share:

• We Care: We care about our drug candidates, our Recursionauts, their families, each other, our communities, the patients we aim to serve and their loved ones. We also care about our work.
• We Learn: Learning from the diverse perspectives of our fellow Recursionauts, and from failure, is an essential part of how we make progress.
• We Deliver: We are unapologetic that our expectations for delivery are extraordinarily high. There is urgency to our existence: we sprint at maximum engagement, making time and space to recover. 
• Act Boldly with Integrity: No company changes the world or reinvents an industry without being bold. It must be balanced; not by timidity, but by doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
• We are One Recursion: We operate with a 'company first, team second' mentality. Our success comes from working as one interdisciplinary team.

Recursion spends time and energy connecting every aspect of work to these values. They aren’t static, but regularly discussed and questioned because we make decisions rooted in those values in our day-to-day work. You can read more about our values and how we live them every day here.

Recursion requires all employees to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 prior to their first date of employment.

More About Recursion 

Central to our mission is the Recursion Operating System, or Recursion OS, that combines an advanced infrastructure layer to generate what we believe is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing proprietary biological and chemical datasets and the Recursion Map, a suite of custom software, algorithms, and machine learning tools that we use to explore foundational biology unconstrained by human bias and navigate to new biological insights which may accelerate our programs. We are a biotechnology company scaling more like a technology company. Recursion is proudly headquartered in Salt Lake City.