--- title: 'Medicinal Chemist at Inductive Bio' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/medicinal-chemist-inductive-bio-new-york-gkfdk6we932p' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-09' --- # Medicinal Chemist at Inductive Bio - **Company:** Inductive Bio - **Location:** New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / Boston, MA - **Compensation:** $210k–$250k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-08-05 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/inductive-bio/d6ef5aca-c6cf-4b82-b710-cf20e3bd2327 ## Job description Inductive Bio is an AI medicinal chemistry partner. We build virtual labs that help drug discovery teams make better decisions, faster, across the full DMTA cycle. Our platform includes Beacon-1 ADMET prediction models, human dose projection tools, and Indy, an AI medicinal chemistry assistant. Through partnerships with CROs, we also offer innovative synthesis approaches, direct-to-dose testing, and cost-effective tier 1 ADME panels that enable initial human PK projection, closing the loop from computational design to experimental validation. Together, these power dozens of small molecule and beyond-rule-of-five programs for biotech and pharma partners. Beacon-1 placed 1st in both the 2025 Polaris and 2026 OpenADMET-ExpansionRx blind competitions, ahead of Merck & Co + NVIDIA and EMD Serono. We've raised $30M from Obvious Ventures, a16z Bio + Health, and Lux Capital, and were selected for a $21M ARPA-H CATALYST award to develop next-generation toxicity models. We are seeking an accomplished Medicinal Chemist to play a key role in building an AI-forward drug discovery platform that impacts all stages of the Design-Make-Test-Analyze cycle, and deploy that platform to dozens of programs across the industry! This role will report directly to our Head of Medicinal Chemistry. What you’ll do: - Be an embedded expert, supporting a variety of partner drug discovery programs from lead generation through development candidate nomination across diverse small molecule modalities. - Alongside outstanding compchem, DMPK, and machine learning colleagues, bring Inductive’s tools and your medchem knowledge to our work as consultants on partners’ projects. - Help deliver value to partners through Inductive’s experimental offerings, where we combine our drug discovery experience, predictive models, and AI workflows with our chemistry and assay CRO partners to answer hypotheses effectively. - Build an AI-native drug discovery platform that will speed drugs to the clinic. Help make your ideas about how to improve the DMTA cycle a reality, as we flesh out Indy (our AI medicinal chemistry agent) and build assay and synthesis workflows that get to high-quality answers more quickly. - Represent Inductive’s mission and build connections in the field, meeting with current and potential partners, gathering feedback about what drug discovery teams need, attending conferences and meetings, giving presentations, and authoring blog posts and publications. Who you are: - An ideal candidate is a creative and accomplished medicinal chemist with a synthetic organic chemistry background who has played a meaningful role in advancing compounds to the development candidate stage. You are excited about working with partners to progress their programs, and you want to build the next generation of tools for drug discovery! - You have direct experience at all stages of drug discovery projects, and can point to go/no go judgement calls you’ve made in lead generation and lead optimization. - You’ve used different approaches to evaluate compound quality, from LLE to dose prediction, and appreciate the importance of contextualizing results in terms of their expected profile in humans. - The more modalities you’ve worked with, the better, from reversible and covalent to heterobifunctionals and peptides. - Along with designing compounds and analyzing data, you have years of experience in chemical synthesis with CROs. As you think about synthetic strategy, you look for convergent routes and late-stage intermediates. - You communicate effectively and proactively, seek feedback, handle proprietary information with discretion, embrace transparency, and treat others with respect. - Experience with predictive models and automation is a plus! (e.g. FEP, predictive ADME, AI retrosynthesis, direct to biology) Working at Inductive At Inductive Bio, we know that the people on the team are what make us great. We offer competitive salary and equity-based compensation; comprehensive healthcare benefits (including dental and vision); and the opportunity to grow along with a rapidly scaling company. We are a passionate, kind, and mature team. Working at a fast-growing startup is not always a 9-5 job, but we believe that our employees should have full lives beyond their career. ## About Inductive Bio ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Inductive Bio provides an AI-powered virtual lab platform that enables chemists to run millions of in silico experiments to accelerate small molecule drug discovery. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2022 - **Founders**: Josh Haimson (CEO) and Ben Birnbaum, Ph.D. (President and CTO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Biotechnology Research, AI-driven Drug Discovery, Small Molecule Therapeutics - **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise biopharma companies, CROs (Contract Research Organizations) - **Mission or purpose statement**: To accelerate small molecule drug discovery by pairing scientists with a virtual lab that can run millions of in silico experiments, surfacing the strongest hypotheses to test in the wet lab. ## Products & Services - **[Indy, AI Chemistry Assistant]**: An AI tool that automates time-consuming chemistry operations and helps design and interpret experiments, acting like an entire chemistry team. - **[Beacon-1, ADMET Models]**: A class of AI models trained on a pre-competitive data consortium for predicting Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity (ADMET) of molecules. It is fine-tuned to a client's chemical space and is benchmarked as state-of-the-art, winning 1st place in multiple blind competitions (e.g., OpenADMET 2025, 2026). - **[Compass, Virtual Lab Software]**: A platform that gives direct access to run virtual experiments, review predictions, and decide which compounds to synthesize in real time. - **[Partnered Services]**: Inductive can operate its virtual lab alongside a partner's team, delivering curated compound ideas. They also partner with select CROs to synthesize and test top compounds, creating an end-to-end, AI-informed feedback loop. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available - **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $29.3M. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: a16z Bio Health, Lux Capital, Obvious Ventures (Lead in Series A), Character Capital, Malay. Partners include Amgen (on a $21M ARPA-H initiative). The company also participates in a pre-competitive ADMET data consortium. - **Growth Signals**: The company has 31 employees with a 120% yearly growth rate. They have delivered multiple development candidates (DCs) and have "dozens of partners." They are leading a $21M ARPA-H initiative with Amgen to develop AI drug toxicity models. Their Beacon-1 models have consecutively won 1st place in major blind ADMET competitions (Polaris, OpenADMET 2025, OpenADMET 2026), demonstrating superior technology. The company is SOC 2 compliant. ## Competitive Advantages - **State-of-the-Art AI Models**: Their AI models are benchmarked as world-leading, having won 1st place in several large, blind ADMET prediction competitions against major pharma and AI drug discovery groups. - **Human-Guided Virtual Lab**: The platform is designed to amplify, not replace, human chemists, combining the scale of AI with the expertise of veteran scientists. - **Pre-competitive Data Consortium**: Access to large, diverse, and proprietary datasets from an industry consortium gives their models a training advantage over competitors. - **End-to-End Acceleration**: Offers a complete loop from in silico design to virtual testing and then to synthesis with a CRO partner, which de-risks and speeds up the drug discovery process. - **IP and Confidentiality**: Clients retain full IP ownership, and all data is kept completely confidential. ## Strategic Focus - **Scaling the virtual lab**: Expanding the use of Beacon-1 and Compass across more biopharma partners. - **Leading in Safety AI**: A key focus is on developing next-generation AI models for predicting drug toxicity in humans, as evidenced by the ARPA-H project. - **Expanding the Data Moat**: Continuously growing the pre-competitive data consortium to improve model accuracy. - **Delivering Development Candidates**: Proving the value of the platform by guiding multiple programs to achieve successful development candidates. ## Why Work Here - **High-Caliber Team**: Work at the intersection of AI and life sciences with a team that includes experts from Google, Flatiron Health, Relay Therapeutics, and MIT. The leadership has deep experience in building innovative AI products and bringing drugs into the clinic. - **Rapid Growth**: A fast-growing startup (120% YoY headcount growth) backed by top-tier investors (a16z, Lux, Obvious). This signals strong momentum and potential for career growth. - **Impactful Mission**: Directly involved in accelerating the creation of new medicines, with tangible outputs like "DCs delivered." - **Culture of Innovation**: The company is building a "virtual lab" that changes how chemistry teams work, using state-of-the-art AI and large datasets. - **Location**: Based in San Francisco, a major hub for both tech and biotech. - **Hiring for Growth**: The careers page indicates active hiring across key roles in the rapidly growing startup, suggesting opportunities for new joiners to make a significant impact [inductive.bio](https://www.inductive.bio/careers). ## Sources 1. [inductive.bio](https://www.inductive.bio/) 2. [inductive.bio](https://www.inductive.bio/careers) 3. [inductive.bio](https://www.inductive.bio/about) 4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/inductive-bio) 5. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/inductive-bio) ## Other roles at Inductive Bio - [Enterprise Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-lead-inductive-bio-new-york-nvnp32gk03j4) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / Boston, MA - [Member of Technical Staff - Computational Chemistry](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-computational-chemistry-inductive-bio-new-york-f0zh727srvv3) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / Boston, MA - [Partnerships Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-lead-inductive-bio-new-york-5pgq7gcvy38t) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / Boston, MA - [Upcoming Roles at Inductive Bio](https://feeny.ai/job/upcoming-roles-at-inductive-bio-inductive-bio-new-york-eharqttkn59s) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / Boston, MA - [Member of Technical Staff - Software Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-software-engineering-inductive-bio-new-york-vz2hezrh1v7f) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / Boston, MA - [Partner Success](https://feeny.ai/job/partner-success-inductive-bio-new-york-e3v5k912zfnv) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / Boston, MA