Senior Director, Medicinal Chemistry
About this opportunity
Job Description
GENERAL SUMMARY:
We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced Medicinal Chemistry leader to join our group at Vertex Oxford at the Senior Director level. Reporting to the Head of Medicinal Chemistry, you will lead a highly skilled and motivated medicinal chemistry team to discover high quality clinical candidates that progress into clinical trials. You will have a track record of success across multiple projects from Hit ID to Candidate delivery. You will lead, develop, and implement state of the art medicinal chemistry strategies, providing key expertise in medicinal chemistry and related disciplines (DMPK, biology, computational chemistry, process chemistry). You will help drive the development of our internal talent through continuous teaching and mentorship.
You may also take on wider project leadership responsibility, driving a multi-disciplinary project team, accountable to the Site Head for the overall strategy and delivery of a key project within our portfolio.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Drive state of the art chemistry design and synthesis to rapidly deliver high-quality clinical candidates.
Exercise exceptional judgement based on significant medicinal chemistry experience to ensure your team delivers molecules with low predicted human doses and overall profiles that enable rapid progression through pre-clinical safety assessments and into clinical trials
Drive and motivate your team of medicinal chemists to deliver molecules using efficient synthetic routes, ensuring smooth transition to scale up teams to enable rapid progress and delivery to project goal timelines.
Provide dynamic leadership of a multidisciplinary drug-discovery team working on a key project within our portfolio.
SKILLS & EXPEREINCE:
Qualifications in Organic or Medicinal Chemistry with extensive experience working in a pharmaceutical and/or biotechnology setting as a medicinal chemist.
Leadership of medicinal chemistry teams with a strong record of scientific accomplishment and success delivering clinical candidates.
Experience from Hit ID to candidate delivery, with deep knowledge of both molecular properties and drug substance solid form.
Expert knowledge of medicinal chemistry literature, organic synthesis, and methodology, with good working knowledge of DMPK, biology, computational chemistry, and structure-based drug design.
A concise and effective communication style to provide teams with clear guidelines, energy, drive, and motivation.
Strong interpersonal teamwork and organizational skills, with ability to thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced, innovative environment. Ability to manage timelines and drive projects to rapidly answer key questions.
Flex Designation:
On-Site Designated
Flex Eligibility Status:
In this On-Site designated role, you will work five days per week on-site with ad hoc flexibility.
Note: The Flex status for this position is subject to Vertex’s Policy on Flex @ Vertex Program and may be changed at any time.
#LI-Onsite
Company Information
Vertex is a global biotechnology company that invests in scientific innovation.
Vertex is committed to equal employment opportunity and non-discrimination for all employees and qualified applicants without regard to a person's race, color, sex, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, or any characteristic protected under applicable law. Vertex is an E-Verify Employer in the United States. Vertex will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with known disabilities, in accordance with applicable law.
Any applicant requiring an accommodation in connection with the hiring process and/or to perform the essential functions of the position for which the applicant has applied should make a request to the recruiter or hiring manager, or contact Talent Acquisition at ApplicationAssistance@vrtx.com
Job details
How this role compares
Computed from every other active Drug Discovery & Preclinical Research role in our database, not just this employer's listings.
We currently track 59 comparable Senior Director Drug Discovery & Preclinical Research roles across 22 biopharma companies.
Salary context
30 of 59 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)
Peers share this role's job function and a matching or adjacent seniority level -- not necessarily the same therapeutic area or country.
Where these roles are based
Top locations among the 59 comparable roles
Seniority mix
59 of 59 peers have a known seniority level
Therapeutic area mix
15 of 59 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden
Similar opportunities
The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.
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How we calculate "similar"
No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.
Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.
0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.