Head of Discovery

Responsibilities

• Identify and evaluate therapeutic targets, building the scientific rationale for program pursuit
• Analyze model outputs to assess drug candidates, evaluating biological plausibility and therapeutic potential
• Prioritize candidates and make scientific go/no-go decisions to advance compounds through the pipeline
• Manage CRO partnerships for candidate synthesis and biological testing
• Design experiments to validate or refine drug design hypotheses
• Collaborate with founders and the model team to integrate drug discovery expertise into model development
• Stay current with target biology, disease mechanisms, and the clinical landscape

Requirements

• PhD in pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, chemical biology, computational biology, or a related field
• 5+ years of drug discovery experience in pharma or biotech
• Hands-on experience in target selection, hit identification, hit-to-lead, and lead optimization
• Proven experience making scientific go/no-go decisions on real programs
• Ability to work directly with computational model outputs and AI-generated molecular data
• Strong scientific judgment regarding disease mechanisms and therapeutic modalities

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AI-driven drug discovery or computational drug design tools
• Experience managing CRO relationships for synthesis and biological testing
• Experience across multiple therapeutic areas or modalities (small molecules, peptides)
• Track record of advancing compounds into preclinical or clinical development
• Programming skills in Python for data analysis and model output interaction
• Publications in top-tier scientific or medicinal chemistry journals

About the Company

Output is a stealth-mode startup building a biological reasoning model that understands biology at scale. Operated by repeat founders and biotech veterans, the company is backed by top-tier VCs including Y Combinator.