Staff Engineer, Chemical Search

About the Company

Satomic’s mission is to close the gap from idea to molecule with faster navigation of chemical space. We are building an automated chemistry platform that integrates laboratory robotics, software, and AI to transform small-molecule synthesis and drug discovery.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the chemistry search engine to expose accessible chemical space through various query modes
• Own the cheminformatics domain, including internal representation, indexing strategy, and inference layer
• Make build-vs-buy decisions on cheminformatics-specific tooling like RDKit, OpenEye, and retrosynthesis systems
• Integrate platform conversion prediction and substrate-scope models as accessibility scoring functions
• Build and prioritize query modes such as bounded enumeration, generative sampling, and structure search
• Establish the cheminformatics function's standards, hiring bar, and team growth

Requirements

• Proven track record of owning a production chemistry search or analogous retrieval system end-to-end
• Production-level fluency with RDKit and/or OpenEye
• Experience with at least one major retrosynthesis system in a production environment
• Direct experience with generative chemistry methods or a strong track record of learning them
• Proficiency in Python and solid software engineering fundamentals
• Ability to hold technical conversations with medicinal or synthetic organic chemists

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with vector indexes such as FAISS, ScaNN, or pgvector
• Familiarity with performance-oriented languages like Rust, Go, or C++
• Experience delivering high-throughput batch scoring and low-latency interactive query workloads