Senior Scientist, Medicinal Chemistry

About Rezo Therapeutics Rezo is a different kind of biopharma company.  Our mission is to dramatically increase the success rate of drug development by building a disease-agnostic, fully-integrated, network biology platform that will redefine our understanding of human disease and ability to treat it.  

Our Founders and members of the Board are a group of esteemed, world-class scientists from the University of California, San Francisco: Nevan Krogan, Kevan Shokat, Sourav Bandyopadhyay, Natalia Jura, as well as renowned biotech executives George Scangos and Norbert Bischofberger. These leaders bring with them a strong track record of amazing discoveries and scientific breakthroughs, leading to very successful companies and many FDA approved drugs. 

Capitalizing on our Series A of $78M from top-tier investors, we are leveraging a unique integrated approach, combining capabilities in genetics, proteomics, structural biology and AI to generate deep biological insights and novel therapeutic approaches.

Located in San Francisco’s vibrant Mission Bay neighborhood, Rezo is in close proximity to UCSF, numerous urban amenities, and outdoor recreational opportunities.  We recognize that realizing our mission depends as much on our people as it does on our science and are building a workplace that fosters collaboration, respect, and diversity where contributing to your team’s success is valued as highly as individual achievements.   If you’re passionate about team science and breaking down barriers to progress in drug development, please consider joining us!

The Opportunity  We are seeking a highly enthusiastic and motivated Medicinal Chemist to join our Discovery team.  This role will contribute to the discovery of precision medicines through the design of small molecules, cross-functional collaborations to advance projects and programs, and incorporation of new technologies to accelerate drug discovery. Becoming a member of this team is an excellent opportunity to join Rezo at an early stage and help build the Chemistry group and company.

What You'll Do:

• Spend at least 50% of your time working on the bench designing and synthesizing molecules
• Design & synthesize molecules using cutting-edge approaches, apply structure-based drug discovery (SBDD), physiochemical property correlations, and computational predictions to optimize potency, selectivity, ADMET, PK, and efficacy profiles
• Play a key role on projects ranging from target validation to development candidate selection, including identification of chemical hits and optimization of leads
• Collaborate with biology and other cross-functional partners to design key go/no go experiments, optimize testing strategies, align compound design with project goals, and identify compounds to test hypotheses
• Work with external synthesis teams, evaluating analytical data, troubleshooting syntheses, optimizing efficiency of the team, identifying common intermediates for scale-up, and adjusting synthesis priorities based on recent data
• Acquire and analyze analytical data to characterize chemical structures and assign purity
• Participate and present at project team and other company meetings

About You:

• PhD in chemistry or related discipline and 4+ years of industrial medicinal chemistry experience or a BS and 12+ years of experience
• Extensive experience with medicinal chemistry, structure-based drug design, and optimizing ADMET, PK and efficacy properties of small molecules
• Passionate about organic synthesis with demonstrated expertise in multi-step synthesis, new synthetic routes design and optimization
• Proficient in purification techniques (including chromatography, crystallization, and distillation), strong ability in structural and stereochemical elucidation using modern analytical methods
• Demonstrated expertise in scale-up synthesis, from gram to hundreds of grams
• Highly organized and systematic at tracking work requests, compounds, and data
• Skilled at the use of scientific literature and patents for drug discovery
• Background in degrader design and synthesis is a plus
• Experience with the upkeep of analytical chemistry instruments (e.g. LCMS) is a plus
• Excellent interpersonal skills, works well within a team, and communicates effectively