Scientific Developer (Chemical Biology Resources)

The Chemical Biology Resources team at EMBL-EBI, on the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge, provides chemogenomics resources including ChEMBL (curated quantitative small-molecule bioactivity data used in drug discovery), SureChEMBL (chemical structures extracted daily from patents), UniChem (cross-database structure links), ChEBI (an ontology of compounds of biological interest) and OPSIN (name-to-structure conversion). The scientific developer builds and maintains software infrastructure for robust, automated ChEMBL releases through streamlined build, packaging, testing and deployment of the Python and Java release pipelines, and supports the team's other services: developing scientific data workflows, integrating external chemical and bioactivity databases such as BindingDB and PubChem, resolving data quality issues with the ChEMBL, SureChEMBL and ChEBI teams, administering databases, documenting workflows, contributing to training and joining cross-campus projects such as Open Targets.

This is a 13-month fixed-term maternity cover, ideally starting in January 2027 for a handover, at Grade 5 or 6 (monthly salary from £3,452 or £3,861 after tax, plus benefits and allowances), with hybrid working patterns.

A PhD or equivalent experience in chemistry, computer science, bioinformatics, data science or a related field; experience in cheminformatics or data engineering for the life sciences; proficient Python with cheminformatics libraries and concepts (RDKit, Open Babel, InChI, SMILES/SMARTS); relational SQL databases; collaborative git-based development; and Linux. Docker, basic Java and AI methods such as NLP or LLMs for data processing are desirable. Applications include a cover letter and CV.