Associate Scientist, Postdoctoral Fellow - AI/ML and Agentic AI for Drug Discovery

Postdoctoral fellowship position in Modeling & Informatics within Discovery Chemistry at Merck's South San Francisco Research Laboratories. The role focuses on developing and evaluating agentic AI frameworks for drug discovery, benchmarking machine learning methods, and conducting independent research in an industrial pharmaceutical setting.

Responsibilities

• Design, execute, and interpret benchmarking studies of AI/ML methods across drug discovery datasets
• Develop and lead independent research projects on AI agent frameworks for drug discovery modeling
• Refine agentic AI workflows to enhance transparency, robustness, and decision-making capabilities
• Analyze complex drug discovery datasets using statistical and machine learning approaches
• Present research findings at internal forums, external conferences, and in peer-reviewed journals

Requirements

• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Computational Chemistry, Cheminformatics, or related discipline
• Demonstrated expertise in machine learning, cheminformatics, or computational chemistry
• Hands-on experience building, training, and evaluating machine learning models in Python
• Strong peer-reviewed publication record and scientific presentation experience
• Experience designing and interpreting computational experiments with statistical analysis
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams
• Excellent oral and written communication skills

Compensation: $82,000-$92,000 base