Senior Scientific Software Engineer, Drug Discovery

Location

United States

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Remote

Department

AI Simulation

Compensation

US Tier 1$152K – $228K

US Tier 2$136.8K – $205.2K

US Tier 3$121.6K – $182.4K

At SandboxAQ, we are committed to competitive, equitable, and transparent compensation; we continuously benchmark our salaries and total compensation to premium markets to ensure our competitiveness. Individual pay within the above range is determined by job-related skills, experience, education, and geographic location.

With a focus on pay equity and ensuring opportunity for future salary progression, our typical practice is to hire within the first half of the base salary range for a given role and level. This approach allows us to reward performance and increasing expertise consistently as your career develops with us.

We use geographic pay tiers to reflect the pay differences in local markets:

For the US:

Tier 1: Applies to candidates within 50 miles of New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Wash D.C., Boston

Tier 2: Applies to candidates within 50 miles of Portland, Boulder, Austin, Denver, Chicago, San Diego, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, LA

Tier 3: Everywhere else in the US

For the UK:

Tier 1: Applies to candidates within 50 miles of London, Cambridge, Oxford

Tier 2: Everywhere else in the UK

For Canada:

Tier 1: Applies to candidates within 50 miles of Toronto & Vancouver

Tier 2: Everywhere else in Canada

About SandboxAQ

SandboxAQ is a high-growth company delivering AI solutions that address some of the world's greatest challenges. The company’s Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) power advances in life sciences, financial services, navigation, cybersecurity, and other sectors.

We are a global team that is tech-focused and includes experts in AI, chemistry, cybersecurity, physics, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and other specialties. The company emerged from Alphabet Inc. as an independent, growth capital-backed company in 2022, funded by leading investors and supported by a braintrust of industry leaders.

At SandboxAQ, we’ve cultivated an environment that encourages creativity, collaboration, and impact. By investing deeply in our people, we’re building a thriving, global workforce poised to tackle the world's epic challenges. Join us to advance your career in pursuit of an inspiring mission, in a community of like-minded people who value entrepreneurialism, ownership, and transformative impact.

The Opportunity

Our team is seeking a Software Engineer to contribute to the development of computational chemistry tools, and bridge the gap from R&D prototypes to stable, well-test, production-ready implementations.

As we continue to our portfolio of capabilities – spanning physics-based simulations, large-scale data and knowledge graphs, machine learning, and massively parallel computing – we require reliable and efficient software to drive it.

We are looking for an experienced engineer who can enhance our team’s work through the creation of clean software and collaboration with a team of computational chemists, physicists, AI experts, and software engineers. This should be founded in a good understanding of the technical challenges and scientific concepts in the drug discovery space, and deep experience building efficient and maintainable implementations of AI- and physics-based simulation software.

Key Responsibilities:

Maintain and extend existing scientific software packages, and drive the full lifecycle of new ones:

Architect and implement cutting-edge scientific and ML software alongside subject matter experts

Adopt current practices and ensure stability through testing

Work closely with the Engineering Team to deploy these modules into the SandboxAQ’s simulation platform:

Manage dependencies, containerize, and integrate software into CI/CD pipelines

Integrate with the compute and data backends

Define API endpoints and schemas

Collaborate with the engineering team to build UI components

Maintain and support production deployments of scientific software packages

Foster a work culture of curiosity and kindness

Essential Skills & Experiences:

Bachelor's degree in a relevant scientific discipline (for example physics, chemistry, biology, or computer science)

At least 5 years professional experience in software development, designing and developing well-maintained software systems and collaborating with domain experts to design solutions that meet their needs

Strong Python proficiency including experience with numeric and performance libraries like Numpy

Experience with ML libraries like PyTorch

Experience with relevant development tools and environments (git, Unix/Linux, cloud-based platforms, containerization)

Experience using LLM tools and coding harnessed to build quickly while producing understandable, secure, maintainable code that’s a strong foundation for long-term development.

Ability to rapidly write good quality code while not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good

Ability to devise, communicate internally and own technical roadmaps, in a self-directed environment

Desire to work in a fast-paced team with diverse professional experiences and viewpoints

Highly Desired Skills & Experience:

Experience developing software for scientific applications

Familiarity with open source scientific and molecular libraries such as OpenMM, RDKit, Scikit-learn

Experience with modern deep learning architectures

Experience with the drug discovery and drug development processes

Why Join Us?

We offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package designed to support your health, financial well-being, and life outside of work.

Compensation: Competitive base salary, performance-based incentives or bonuses (where applicable), and equity participation.

Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents with generous employer premium contributions, retirement savings with company matching, paid parental leave, and inclusive family-building benefits.

Work-Life Balance: Flexible paid time off, company-wide seasonal breaks, and support for flexible work arrangements that enable sustainable performance.

Career Development: Opportunities for continuous learning and growth through on-the-job development, cross-functional collaboration, and access to internal learning and development programs.

SandboxAQ Welcomes All

We are committed to fostering a culture of belonging and respect, where diverse perspectives are actively sought and valued. Our multidisciplinary environment provides ample opportunity for continuous growth - working alongside humble, empowered, and ambitious colleagues ready to tackle epic challenges.

Accommodations: We provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities in job application procedures for open roles. If you need such an accommodation, please let a member of our Recruiting team know.

Read: Guidance for candidates on using AI Tools in interviews

Compensation Range: $121.6K - $228K