Director of ML Research – AI Applications

About Apheris

At Apheris, we are building the future of how AI is applied in pharmaceutical R&D.

We enable leading pharmaceutical teams to discover and develop drugs faster. We host the industry’s largest federated data networks for drug discovery AI, spanning co-folding, ADMET, and antibody developability.

Across these networks, models are trained on proprietary industry datasets to achieve higher performance and broader applicability while keeping data control and IP protected. We deliver these superior models through drug discovery applications that enable teams to run them at scale, further customize them, and integrate them into existing R&D workflows.  

• AI Structural Biology (AISB) Network: Pharmaceutical companies collaborate in the field of co-folding, structure-based binding affinity predictions and antibody design.
• ADMET Network: Pharmaceutical and biotech companies collaborate to improve small-molecule property prediction and expand to further drug modalities.
• Antibody Developability Network: Pharma partners collaborate to federate historical and purpose-built antibody developability datasets for secure ML training, without data leaving each partner’s environment.

About the role

We are building a new ML Research team within the broader AI Applications group at Apheris. AI Applications brings together multiple engineering teams responsible for delivering production-grade AI models for drug discovery, and this role will establish the dedicated research capability within that organisation. As the founding leader of the team, you will define its direction, build and mentor a high-performing group of researchers and engineers over time, and work directly on some of the most strategically important modelling questions across our structural biology and ADMET initiatives.
This is a player-coach role. You will be expected to set research direction, hire and mentor a team, and remain deeply involved in model development, experimentation, evaluation, and scientific problem-solving. The role is focused primarily on applied research rather than blue-sky research for its own sake: the emphasis is on taking strong ideas from the literature and adapting them to high-value biological and customer problems. Over time, as the team matures, there will be room to expand into more exploratory research directions.
In the first six months, a major focus will be the regularisation and generalisation of co-folding models. More broadly, the ML Research team will operate cross-functionally across Apheris initiatives, working across our small and large molecules networks to answer complex scientific questions and translate them into scalable modelling approaches with validated results.
You will also work with academic partners from leading labs, collaborate closely with interdisciplinary internal teams, and represent Apheris externally by presenting methods and findings to customers, partners, and at conferences.

What you will do

• Set up and lead the dedicated ML Research team within AI Applications, working alongside existing engineering teams andestablishingthe research mandate for the organisation.
• Design, enhance, and train foundation models at scale for structural biology and co-folding, addressing core challenges in protein interaction modelling and drug discovery. 
• Leverage large-scale proprietary structural biology and biophysical datasets to de