Scientist , Medicinal Chemistry

Reports To: Director of Medicinal Chemistry

Employment Type: Full-Time, Exempt

Unnatural Products (UNP) is an integrated biotech company at the forefront of macrocyclic peptide drug discovery. Our mission is delivering first-in-class macrocycle therapeutics for high impact disease areas. UNP's approach couples machine learning-based in silico tools with massively parallel peptide chemistry to enable the discovery and rapid optimization of highly non-natural macrocyclic peptides aimed at extracellular targets, undruggable intracellular targets, and beyond.

Based in Santa Cruz, CA, we are a passionate team of scientists and operators doing high-quality science in a beautiful setting—where innovation and work-life balance go hand in hand. Come shape the future of UNP with us!

UNP is seeking a Scientist I, Medicinal Chemistry to join our growing Chemistry team and help define and create the next generation of beyond Rule of Five (bRo5) therapeutics< b >. This highly hands-on role will apply contemporary macrocyclic peptide synthesis strategies and emerging synthetic methodologies to support both our discovery pipeline and proprietary platform. Reporting to the Director, Medicinal Chemistry, the successful candidate will leverage their expertise in synthesis and medicinal chemistry to contribute across hit finding, hit-to-lead, and lead optimization designing and advancing novel chemical matter while developing their skills as a drug discovery scientist.

This role is highly collaborative and will interact daily with our data science and computational teams to support interpretation and molecular design, biology and pharmacology teams to develop assay workflows that enable in vivo translation, and platform chemistry team to push the boundaries of parallel chemistry and library synthesis This is an opportunity to work at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and computation while contributing directly to innovative macrocyclic peptide programs and helping expand what is possible within the bRo5 drug space.

• Design, synthesize, purify, and characterize macrocyclic peptides from sub-milligram through gram scale, supporting active drug discovery programs.
• Utilize automated peptide synthesizers and UNP’s proprietary parallel synthetic platform to efficiently generate high-quality chemical matter.
• Optimize peptide synthesis, cyclization, purification, and analytical workflows to improve efficiency, reproducibility, and scalability.
• Develop and implement novel synthetic strategies to overcome challenging chemistry and enable access to new peptide scaffolds and chemical space.
• Collaborate with other medicinal chemists to interpret SAR, develop design hypotheses, and generate high-quality chemical matter.
• Contribute to CRO chemistry workflows and coordination, including communicating synthetic priorities and reviewing external results.
• Support and mentor colleagues as appropriate while contributing to a highly collaborative laboratory environment.
• Work closely with the biology, pharmacology, computational science, software, and de-novo teams to coordinate research activities and execute against project goals .
• Communicate results to internal teams and managers in the form of presentations, reports, and ad-hoc meetings or calls.
• Contribute to the continued development and optimization of UNP’s proprietary parallel synthetic platform.

Qualifications:

• Ph.D. in Chemistry or related field with 0+ years of relevant industry experience; or a M.S. in Chemistry with 7+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Strong foundations in synthetic organic chemistry and/or peptide chemistry, with demonstrated hands-on laboratory expertise.
• Profi…