Associate Director, Computational Biology - Early Discovery

Your work will change lives. Including your own.

The Impact You’ll Make

As an Associate Director within Recursion’s early discovery team, you will be at the forefront of reimagining drug discovery from first principles. You will lead a team of world‑class computational biologists focused on identifying and advancing the next generation of oncology targets and therapeutics to fill our internal pipeline. You will act as a “player‑coach,” balancing direct technical contribution with the mentorship and strategic leadership of a high‑performing team.

Your mission is to integrate Recursion’s massive datasets—phenomics, transcriptomics, genomics, proteomics—to nominate novel targets, validate disease biology, and define the precision oncology strategies to advance our most promising therapeutic targets into full‑fledged drug discovery programs.

This highly collaborative role partners with biologists, data scientists, platform and data engineers, and translational experts to develop and scale methods for target discovery in oncology and immunological diseases. The ideal candidate has strong stakeholder management, technical communication, and 3+ years biotech or pharma experience in early drug discovery.

In this role, you will:

• Drive Target Discovery: Evaluate the molecular evidence for target nomination and validation, leveraging Recursion’s platform to identify novel vulnerabilities in disease biology.
• Lead and mentor a team of data scientists and computational biologists, fostering a culture of scientific rigor, bold experimentation, delivery, and continuous professional growth.
• Pilot novel methods for target discovery, disease biology validation, and early patient population hypotheses to send programs into nomination cascades.
• Define internal criteria for target data packages and early patient population strategy.
• Connect your team’s innovative analysis methods to platform and engineering teams so that we solve current projects and accelerate future ones.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally: Partner with biologists, medicinal chemists, translational, and clinical leads to build compelling data packages that drive program milestones and portfolio investment decisions.
• Present data analysis to external decision makers and stakeholders in a clear and compelling way that drives toward getting medicines to patients.

The Team You’ll Join

Our group is a bold, agile, diverse collective of computational drug discovery scientists deeply focused on bringing new therapeutics into the clinic at an accelerated pace. Our expertise spans precision oncology, I&I, and neuroscience, and we focus on advancing novel, targeted therapies for these disease areas. We partner closely with other functions to design and execute impactful data analyses for new targets and drug programs and are responsible for data strategy across the portfolio.

The Experience You’ll Need

• PhD in a relevant field (computational biology, bioinformatics, cancer biology, immuno‑oncology, etc.) with a very strong computational focus and 3+ years of experience in biotech or pharma industry, OR MS in a relevant field and 5+ years of experience in biotech or pharma industry solving fundamental problems in early drug discovery.
• Domain expertise in oncology or immunological diseases.
• Strong understanding of patient genetics and druggability of disease‑relevant pathways.
• Experience applying computational methods (including probabilistic, statistical, and/or machine learning techniques) to analyze and integrate complex biological and/or human clinical data in a high‑level programming language such as Python or R.
• Exceptional data visualization skills.
• A track record of managing and developing direct reports within a scientific or technical environment.
• Excellent cross‑functional communication skills, including an ability to explain complex scientific concepts to a variety of audiences using a combination of plots, documents, and presentations.

Nice To Have:

• Experience building a target discovery engine in oncology or immunological diseases.
• Experience designing high‑throughput screens with CRISPR or small molecule perturbations to validate therapeutic hypotheses.
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