Principal Scientist, Oncology - Early Drug Discovery

Recursion is a clinical-stage biotechnology company that integrates technological innovations across biology, chemistry, automation, data science and engineering to improve the lives of patients and industrialize drug discovery. Our team is working to solve some of the hardest, most meaningful problems facing human health today. Come join us in our mission to decode biology to radically improve lives.

Recursion’s broad technological expertise has built a massively-scaled process for relating high-dimensional, phenotypic states of cellular biology, resulting from genetic, therapeutic and soluble factor perturbation. With 2.4 trillion predicted biological and chemical relationships generated thus far, deeply challenging and complex cancer biology can be interrogated at an incredible scale. Our aim is to turn the bespoke, artisanal, and serial process of drug discovery into a search and validation problem, enabling one to immediately convert new hypotheses into potential therapeutic opportunities.

The Impact You’ll Make

You will drive multiple early drug discovery projects from launch to preclinical development and help our efforts in advancing new oncology therapeutics to patients. You will be at the forefront of developing new approaches that reimagine small molecule drug discovery using Recursion’s massive data capabilities. As a Principal Scientist, you will:

• Discover and develop new strategies for leveraging Recursion’s unique capacity to perform >1 million experiments per week for oncology program nomination and machine learning-enabled program advancement
• Integrate knowledge from human genetics, preclinical models, and principles of drug discovery to drive the development of novel medicines across all areas of oncology
• Initiate and accelerate a massive pipeline of new therapeutic programs encompassing both immuno-oncology and precision medicine approaches into Recursion’s oncology pipeline at an accelerated pace, iterating quickly from ideation to validation on multiple projects
• Synthesize preclinical and clinical data sets from the public domain towards accelerating insight- and program-generation from Recursion’s phenomics data
• Define the biological rationale and strategically assess areas of unmet need to advance our capabilities and answer critical questions
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Recursion’s computational biology, chemistry, pharmacology and HTS experts to initiate validation screens and further advance compounds from early discovery through preclinical stages

The Team You’ll Join 

Reporting to the Director, Translational oncology, you will join a highly interdisciplinary, modern oncology group centered on machine learning and inference-based drug discovery. The group is a bold and agile collective of drug discovery and machine learning scientists deeply focused on the singular goal of bringing new cancer therapeutics to patients at an accelerated pace. You will lead project strategy, initiation and execution within a small group of similarly dedicated scientists, and collaborate extensively throughout the organization and externally, to advance milestones and provide insights to further advance Recursion’s capabilities. Key attributes to this role include a bold, execution-oriented attitude and passion for deploying rigorous science to end cancer. You will report to the director of translational oncology. 

Location

Making Salt Lake City your home base is ideal for this position, however we will consider remote work for this position. We ask that remote employees commit to regular on-site visits for routine work and departmental events.

*Subject to change for remote-based employees

The Experience You’ll Need

• PhD and 5+ years experience applying professional competencies to fundamental problems of relevance to oncology drug discovery specifically in a biopharma industry setting OR MS and 8+ years experience applying professional competencies to fundamental problems of relevance to oncology drug discovery specifically in a biopharma industry setting
• Experience with design, execution, and analysis of diverse molecular biology techniques (cell culture, gene expression and protein quantification technologies, etc.). Note: This role will not involve at-the-bench experiment execution
• Experience managing external resources (CROs)
• Demonstrable experience advancing therapeutics program from discovery to preclinical development 
• Understanding of current state of oncology therapeutic development and ability to drive scientific strategy 
• Understanding of small molecule drug discovery and pharmacology
• Experience leading and prioritizing among multiple projects and efficiently advancing projects to proof of concept
• Bold, passionate, and highly collaborative growth mindset 

#LI-LM1

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.

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.