Cheminformatics Developer

Are you a Cheminformatician with excellent development skills searching for a new challenge at the forefront of drug discovery? Then consider joining our R&D-IT team, enabling AstraZeneca scientists to accelerate Design-Make-Test-Analyse (DMTA) cycles and progress outstanding drug candidates through our R&D pipeline.



This is an outstanding opportunity for someone with practical solution-development experience to use their knowledge of chemical structure and reactions, data-wrangling and analysis/analytics in early drug discovery data workflows.

AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven bio-pharmaceutical business that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialisation of prescription medicines for some of the most serious diseases. But we're more than one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. At AstraZeneca, we're proud to have a unique workplace culture that encourages innovation and collaboration. Here, employees are empowered to express diverse perspectives and are made to feel valued, energised and rewarded for their ideas and creativity and are supported by high quality training and development opportunities.



What you'll do

You will be part of a close-knit and technical team of informaticians, data scientists, machine learning and knowledge engineers, delivering data workflows and informatics solutions that will advance the standard of healthcare and improve the lives of millions of patients across the globe. Working alongside other IT colleagues (engineers, business analysts and architects) as well as computational chemists, medicinal chemists and assay scientists, you will use your programming skills and knowledge of front and back-end tools and infrastructure to store, manipulate, prepare and present your ideas and solutions to scientific and IT colleagues. Working both as an individual and team contributor, excellent problem solving and communication skills will be required to understand business challenges, impart insights, and advance early-stage Drug Discovery projects. By maintaining up-to-date knowledge of the field and ongoing developments in wider areas we use these insights to impact early discovery.



Key Responsibilities

* Work closely within the team and with scientific colleagues across AstraZeneca early science units to ensure informatics and advanced analytics solutions meet the ongoing needs of scientists.
* Develop informatics solutions, e.g., using pipelining approaches, scripting and application integration to address key problems in the early science (DMTA) space.
* Contribute to and potentially lead local and global science IT/informatics projects in DMTA space.
* Seek solutions that streamline the data workflow across early science and ensure all scientists have access to the right data and tools required to solve their key business problems at the right time
* Research external peers, academics and software providers to apply the latest methods to relevant business problems
* Work closely with data scientists, machine learning, global engineering and platform teams to use the latest algorithms to deliver improved data and information to early science project teams
* Promote AstraZeneca's informatics and data science reputation through external publications and presentations


Candidate Knowledge, Skills and Experience

The following attributes are considered essential:

* Masters / PhD in Cheminformatics or a pharmaceutical scientific discipline or similar field with a proven record of informatics delivery in a pharmaceutical/biotech setting
* The ideal candidate will possess a blend of early discovery science skills (e.g., chemistry, bioscience, DMPK, safety), and experience of working in a scientific environment with successful experience of integrating workflows and building quality applications related to DMTA.
* Strong coding and software engineering skills such as Python, Java, JavaScript, Scripting
* Experience working with relevant software and molecular toolkits from vendors and providers such as Biovia, PerkinElmer, Chemaxon, Openeye, Dotmatics, Certara, Genedata, RDKit etc
* Database and semantic skills (e.g. Oracle, MySql, RDF/Triple stores/SPARQL, no-SQL, etc.)
* Excellent communication skills and facilitation skills with the ability to work with others to achieve objectives
* Good communication, written and verbal skills, proficient English

The following skills are considered advantageous to your application

* DMTA cycle pipelining experience, e.g., using Pipeline Pilot or Knime, on very large datasets
* Knowledge of cloud environment and related technologies
* Experience working directly with relevant vendors
* Ability to explain complex methods and techniques to a non-technical audience
* Be able to demonstrate influencing & innovation skills



Competitive salary and benefits
Job post opening: 2021-04-08
Job post ending: 2021-04-29