Drug Discovery Scientist (Computational) — AI Consultant

We are looking to expand our team of expert consultants with 50 PhD scientists who work in drug discovery and use computational tools as a substantive part of their day-to-day research. This is part-time, fully-remote work supporting frontier AI research. Projects start at $70 to $100 USD per hour, with higher rates for experts with particularly deep or specialized experience, seniority, or extensive publication records.

Much of this work centers on the computational side of your research: explaining how specialized tools and workflows are actually selected, configured, and interpreted in real projects, and identifying where AI reasoning breaks down against reality. You will be stress-testing leading AI models on research-level problems in your area of expertise and assessing whether their reasoning meets the standards of a trained scientist.

You will not be conducting drug-discovery research for Aligned. You will be applying your scientific judgment to AI research projects.

Visit our website to learn more: https://alignedhq.ai/for-experts

Sign up to get started: https://app.alignedhq.ai/signup

About Aligned

At Aligned, we partner with the world's leading AI companies to push the frontier of AI knowledge in fields like STEM, medicine, finance, and the humanities. Our platform matches subject-matter experts (like you) with paid consulting work on frontier projects at these companies.

Who We're Looking For

You hold a PhD in biology, chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, or a closely related field, and you work somewhere in the drug discovery and development pipeline. Most importantly, you personally use computational tools, software, models, or data pipelines to make or support scientific decisions, rather than only generating experimental data that a separate computational team analyzes.

We welcome both dedicated computational scientists and experimental or translational scientists whose work includes a meaningful computational component. You do not need to be a software engineer or hold a computational job title. Relevant experience may include scripting, bioinformatics or cheminformatics pipelines, specialized GUI-based modeling software, quantitative analysis platforms, internal research systems, and the routine interpretation of computational output.

This opportunity is not intended for scientists whose work is exclusively wet-lab based, or for generalist data and machine-learning professionals without deep drug-discovery domain expertise.

We're recruiting across the full drug discovery pipeline, including:

• Target identification and validation: functional genomics, CRISPR screens, omics, pathway and network analysis
• Medicinal and computational chemistry: docking, FEP, QSAR, virtual screening, ADMET prediction, and cheminformatics
• Structural biology and biomolecular design: crystallography, cryo-EM, structure prediction, molecular dynamics, protein and antibody design
• Assay development and screening: HTS/HCS analytics, image analysis, curve fitting, hit selection, screening statistics
• DMPK and safety: PK/PD, PBPK, QSP, pharmacometrics, computational toxicology
• Translational science: biomarker discovery, clinical omics, patient stratification

Modality-specific expertise is especially welcome: antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, degraders and PROTACs, oligonucleotides and RNA therapeutics, cell and gene therapy, peptides, vaccines, and small molecules

Minimum Qualifications

• Fluent English reading and writing skills
• PhD in biology, chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology or a closely related field
• Currently active in drug discovery research or development in industry, academia, government, or another research organization
• Hands-on use of computational tools or workflows in your own research
• Ability to clearly explain complex scientific methods, decisions, and conclusions