Associate Director, Computational Biology – Early Discovery

Recursion•Salt Lake City, UT

22h•$200,600 - $220,500•Hybrid

About The Position

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 is a highly collaborative role: you will partner 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.

Requirements

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 Haves

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
Previous exposure to translational and/or clinical development programs to guide selection of relevant models for target validation experiments

Responsibilities

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 the current project and accelerate future ones
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.