dayhoff-labs - Computational Scientist, Biocatalysis

London, UK, Manchester1mo ago

In Office EMEA Logistics Research Scientist

Requirements

• Role-description signals matter more than CV signals here — a PhD, where you trained, prior industry experience, and Nature papers are all non-essential. We care about: • A track record of putting computational designs into wet labs and tracking what happened (the worked-to-didn't ratio matters less than whether you can explain the failures mechanistically) • Fluency across the protein ML stack (at least some of ESM, AlphaFold or Boltz, RFdiffusion, ProteinMPNN / LigandMPNN, docking) and comparable fluency in biocatalysis fundamentals (mechanism, kinetics, common cofactors, expression bottlenecks) • Good taste in tool selection • Comfort talking to chemists and fermentation engineers about your model choices in their language • Highly preferred • Experience driving projects from substrate to characterised design without waiting to be handed the next step • Scepticism about your own outputs — you'll flag a junk prediction rather than over-claim • Compensation is highly competitive. We're also able to sponsor visas for the right candidate.

Responsibilities

• Own the computational side of one to three commercial projects at a time, end to end: substrate analysis, starting-point selection, optimisation strategy, design rounds, in silico characterisation • Pick the tool stack per project, defend your choices on technical grounds, and revise them when the data says otherwise • Design and train novel architectures • Acquire new training data, both computationally and experimentally • Work closely with the wet-lab team on assay design, hit-call thresholds, and iteration