Generalproximity

Generalproximity

Head of Computational Chemistry

San Francisco, CA

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 55 days ago
Machine LearningData ScienceFDA RegulatoryBioinformaticsResearchLeadership

About the role

  • The ideal candidate is a computational drug hunter who combines deep technical expertise with practical medicinal chemistry judgment.
  • This is an on-site position with flexible working hours.

Responsibilities

  • Computational Chemistry and Molecular Design
  • Provide hands-on computational chemistry support to small-molecule discovery programs from target evaluation, hit identification, hit-to-lead, and lead optimization through candidate nomination.
  • Apply structure-based and ligand-based design approaches to guide compound design, including docking, molecular dynamics, pharmacophore modeling, QSAR, scaffold hopping, virtual screening, FEP/free-energy methods, and multi-parameter optimization.
  • Use structural biology data, including X-ray structures, cryo-EM structures, homology models, and AlphaFold-derived models, to generate actionable design hypotheses.
  • Partner with the medicinal chemistry team to interpret SAR, optimize potency, selectivity, physicochemical, ADME/PK, developability, and synthetic feasibility.
  • Lead computational design discussions with project teams and translate complex modeling results into clear, practical medicinal chemistry recommendations.
  • Support portfolio prioritization by evaluating target tractability, ligandability, binding-site quality, chemical matter, and developability risks.
  • Build and maintain a scalable chem and bioinformatics infrastructure to support compound registration, structure-searching, SAR analysis, property visualization, compound triage, library design, and project decision-making.
  • Implement tools for chemical data handling, including similarity and substructure searching, R-group analysis, matched molecular pairs, reaction enumeration, compound clustering, property prediction, and visualization.
  • Work with internal or external engineering and data science teams to integrate chemical, biological, DMPK, structural, and assay data into usable project dashboards and design tools.

Nice to have

  • PhD in Computational Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Chemical Physics, Biophysics, Cheminformatics, Physical Organic Chemistry, or a related discipline
  • A minimum of 15 years of relevant experience in pharma, biotech, or a drug discovery-focused research environment

Skills

  • A long-standing challenge in drug discovery is the development of molecules capable of modulating difficult or "undruggable" targets.
  • Disease-causing proteins can be dysfunctional in many different ways, but our armamentarium for fixing them is quite limited.
  • The Position

Company info

  • The most common mechanism of action for FDA-approved drugs is inhibition, but there are many other possible perturbation types whose potential remains unrealized.
  • General Proximity is a seed-stage drug discovery company developing a novel platform technology to solve this problem.
  • We make bifunctional drugs that induce the modification of drug targets by existing cellular machinery (rather than through direct modulation by the drug, the classical approach).
  • Historically, the development of technologies that allow one to push new buttons in biology has been an incredibly fertile field for the discovery of new medicines, and our technology holds the same promise.

Visa & Work Authorization

  • Our OmniTAC drug discovery engine furnishes molecules that co-opt existing cellular machinery to overcome therapeutic challenges, which have remained unapproachable to other modalities for decades.
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This listing is sourced directly from Generalproximity's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.