Scientist

Schrödinger seeks a Senior or Principal Scientist in Structural Biology (Target Druggability and Structure-Based Drug Design) to join us in our mission to transform the discovery of therapeutics and materials!

Schrödinger has pioneered a physics-based software platform that enables discovery of high-quality, novel molecules for drug development and materials applications more rapidly and at lower cost compared to traditional methods. The software platform is used by biopharmaceutical and industrial companies, academic institutions, and government laboratories around the world. Our multidisciplinary drug discovery team also leverages the software platform to advance collaborative programs and its own pipeline of novel therapeutics to address unmet medical needs.   As a member of our Structural Biology and Target Enablement team in our Therapeutics Group, you’ll partner with Molecular Pharmacologists, Biologists, Medicinal Chemists, and Computational Chemists to define target tractability strategies, identify and validate novel and cryptic binding sites, and design and supervise experimental campaigns to solve unprecedented structures that unlock previously intractable targets. Sitting at the interface of computation and experiment, you’ll be as comfortable proposing in silico-predicted binding site hypotheses as you are designing and executing the experimental structural biology strategies to test them.

Who will love this job:

• A scientist with a track record of success in assessing and expanding oral drug tractability for challenging and undrugged targets
• A structural and computational biology expert who’s familiar with Schrödinger’s platform (Glide, FEP+, BioLuminate, Prime, etc.) or comparable structure-based design software
• A veteran of computational-experimental hybrid work in biotech, pharma, or an SBDD-focused software company
• A researcher who has worked on modality-switch programs (e.g., biologic-to-small-molecule or PROTAC/molecular glue strategies)
• An excellent scientific communicator who has presented target tractability assessments to senior stakeholders and defended hypotheses under scientific scrutiny

What you’ll do:

• Define druggability hypotheses for difficult-to-drug targets by integrating structural, computational, biophysical, and pharmacological evidence
• Apply and advance computational methods, including AI/ML approaches, for structure prediction and refinement, small-molecule binding site identification (including cryptic and transient pockets), pocket druggability scoring, and conformational sampling of target ensembles
• Translate structural and computational insights into actionable hypotheses for medicinal chemistry and biology teams, proposing specific experiments (biophysical, structural, or computational) to test and de-risk emerging druggability hypotheses