Frontier Medicines, located in South San Francisco, CA, is a pre-clinical stage biopharmaceutical company that is pioneering breakthrough technologies to drug the “undruggable” proteome.  Frontier Medicines’ proprietary platform uses chemoproteomics – an innovative approach to chemically interrogate proteins in living systems – to discover and pharmacologically target new binding pockets (or hotspots) on proteins for the purpose of making them accessible to therapeutic intervention.

On Sept. 23, 2019, FierceBiotech named Frontier Medicines as one of 2019’s Fierce 15 biotechnology companies. This is FierceBiotech’s 17th annual Fierce 15 selection, which recognizes the most promising private biotechnology companies in the industry.

Frontier Medicines is seeking a highly motivated individual to fill the position Scientist Computational Chemistry. The successful candidate will play a leading role in developing medicinal chemistry optimization strategies for our most important drug discovery campaigns. He/she will be reviewing experimental results and develop SAR hypotheses for activity, selectivity and properties and make suggestions to improve the profiles of our leading small molecule drug candidates. Analysis will involve the full arsenal of ligand and structure based methods as well as insights from unbiased machine learning type algorithms.

This role is key to Frontier Medicine’s success and an opportunity to join and work in a highly collaborative and energetic team in a startup environment with short communication lines across functions and departments, and routine interactions with senior leaders. The position will report to the Head of Computational Chemistry and is located in South San Francisco.

Key responsibilities:

• Design, execute, and analyze computational chemistry experiments utilizing ligand based and structure based drug design strategies.
• Develop big-data type algorithmic approaches to generate insights about compound series and analyze and guide screening library design using cheminformatics techniques.
• Stay on top of latest developments in the field of computer aided drug design (CADD) and lead the internalization of promising approaches.
• Be a valuable partner for our internal and external medicinal chemists with expert knowledge about our small molecule lead series including SAR, properties, selectivity patterns and etc.
• Communicate results, hypotheses and suggestions in a clear manner in written and oral form.

• Ph.D. in a computational chemistry or related discipline with relevant experience in a biotech or pharma setting preferred.
• Expert level experience with one or more computational chemistry suites (MOE, Maestro, OpenEye) is required.
• Experience applying small molecule modeling to protein binding is required.
• Experience with quantum mechanics techniques and approaches is a plus.
• Expert knowledge with scripting languages (e.g. Python) is required.
• Excellent writing and verbal skills are required.
• Ability to work with independence and drive in a startup environment.
• A commitment to excellence, including ensuring that fellow team members focus on high quality science and a professional working environment.
• Legally authorized to work in the US.