Drug Hunter
Paris
Drug hunter /
Full-time (French "CDI") /
Hybrid
About AQEMIA
AQEMIA is a next-gen pharmatech company generating one of the world's fastest-growing drug discovery pipeline.
Our mission is to design fast innovative drug candidates for dozens of critical diseases, such as immuno-oncology.
Our unique approach leverages quantum-inspired physics algorithms to power generative AI in designing novel drug candidates—without relying on experimental data.
We already delivered several drug discovery successes within our internal pipeline and through collaborations with pharmaceutical companies. Our most advanced programs are currently in vivo optimization.
About the team you’ll join
Within Aqemia’s drug discovery portfolio team, Drug hunters are the pillars of drug discovery projects, leveraging our unique technology to invent a next generation of drugs.
Objective of such projects is to invent therapeutic molecules (hits / leads) against a given target protein and related disease, leveraging our unique technology combining new Physics and Machine Learning algorithms.
Projects can be in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies to invent molecules for their targets, or within Aqemia internal project portfolio.
A project is run by a core team - ie a drug hunter, a project leader, plus part of a Chemist and Biologist - and relies on the technology and ways of working developed by Aqemia platform.
Your role as a drug hunter at Aqemia
- Design / Generate in the computer small molecules to address a given therapeutic target, starting with drug-target affinity and selectivity, and adding other efficiency & safety properties within Aqemia or in collaboration with Pharma partners based on technology from Aqemia’s platform, experimental results from the project and literature from the project
- Communicate in a concise and written way your hypotheses and work plan, so that they can be discussed and improved, incl. code with attention to robustness and reproducibility
- Apply and test the baseline technology and ways of working developed by Aqemia’s platform: generative AI algorithms to invent molecules, properties prediction models, molecular dynamic techniques, …
- Give systematic feedback to Aqemia’s technology platform in a structured and constructive way, based on your experience and project experimental results
- Propose new ideas to advance the project and improve Aqemia’s technology to make it more precise, fast, scalable
- Discuss Chemistry plan with CROs to optimize predictions of properties and ease of synthesis and test
- Work hand-in-hand with Aqemia’s interdisciplinary team beyond your project team, incl. Machine Learning engineers, software engineers, computational chemists and theoretical physicists
- Mentor more junior drug hunters
The competencies we are looking for
- You have Ph.D. and post-doctoral experience as well as a track record of technical excellence as shown by peer reviewed publications
- Inventorship status on patents is a great nice to have
- You have 3+ years of pharma/biotech/CRO experience with a focus on computational chemistry or computational biology
- You have hands-on experience in computational chemistry applied to drug discovery using state-of-the-art structure-based or ligand-based methods, including techniques such as virtual screening, molecular docking, structure-activity relationship analysis, multi-property optimization-based compound design
- You have extensive knowledge of protein structures, functions and protein-ligand interactions
- You have knowledge of computational chemistry packages: RDKIT, OpenMM, parmed, GROMACS, Ambertools, MDAnalysis, …
- You have proficiency in small molecule ligand discovery (esp. SBDD) and cheminformatics techniques including protein homology modeling, small molecule docking and pharmacophore hypothesis, in silico virtual screening, QSAR and ADMET properties modeling, database searches, combinatorial library design, FEP based affinity predictions, molecular dynamics simulations, etc.
- You are an object-oriented programmer coder who’s comfortable with object-oriented programming in Linux/UNIX environments.
- Intermediate to advanced python programming
- You are eager to play an active role in contributing to Aqemia’s strategy to develop drugs for patients.
- You are anxious to bring your wealth of knowledge and skills to the table to inspire and coach brilliant people from diverse backgrounds.
- You are keen to solve tough problems on issues that truly matter, with a proactive and a can-do attitude.
- You thrive on working collaboratively in a fast-paced, interdisciplinary environment that keeps everyone on track.
Preferred mindset
Our recruitment process
- 1 - Hiring Manager’s interview: you’ll meet directly with your future manager Quentin (1h, visio call)
- 2 - Technical assessment of your skills: questions around molecular modeling, medical chemistry, molecular docking and cheminformatics (1h, visio call)
- 3 - Cultural fit interview with our co-founder and COO Emmanuelle (45min, visio call)
- 4 - Final interview with our co-founder and CEO Maximilien (45min, visio call)
Why Join Us ?
At AQEMIA, we work for a mission: joining us means having your own impact on changing the way drugs are discovered, and helping to shape the direction of our fast-growing company and team.
Expanding Drug Discovery Pipeline : Focused on critical diseases like immuno-oncology, with in vivo proof of concept/patent stage programs. Collaborations with top Pharma, including a $140M Sanofi deal.
Interdisciplinary Team : brilliant talent from tech and life sciences.
Experienced Leadership : Founders with 15+ years at ENS, Oxford, Cambridge, and BCG.
DeepTech Recognition: Part of French Tech 120 and France 2030.
Prime Location : Based in central Paris with the possibility of 2 remote days per week.
International Environment : English-speaking team with relocation support and French lessons if needed.
Strong Financial Backing : $60M raised from leading European deeptech investors