Preclinical R&D Expert – In-house Drug Development

Official role description

Mercor is partnering with a venture-backed AI lab building frontier AI platforms and physics-based foundation models for chemistry, materials science, and drug discovery. They're extending their platform into new areas of pharmaceutical development and are looking for hands-on preclinical R&D experts across drug modalities to help guide what they build.

Are you a preclinical R&D scientist who has taken drug programs from the bench toward the clinic

and curious how AI is reshaping drug discovery? This is a hands-on role that blends your wet-lab and translational experience with a growing understanding of how scientific data trains the next generation of AI models.

In this role, you'll: • Review technical materials and real-world R&D data in your area of expertise • Label, classify, and annotate scientific data and model outputs to improve model performance • Provide expert perspective on key scientific and development decisions (target/modality selection, optimization, trade-offs, risk) • Help define structure and quality standards for the client's dataset pipeline • Participate in expert discussions, interviews, and research engagements

You're a strong fit if you: • Have hands-on, non-administrative preclinical R&D experience at a company that develops its own drug assets in-house and has taken programs to the clinic

Must Have • Work in a core R&D function: discovery biology, medicinal chemistry, protein/antibody engineering, computational, in vivo/translational, pharmacology/PK-PD, toxicology, or CMC/formulation

Must Have • Have hands-on experience with one or more drug modalities (small molecules, monoclonal antibodies, peptides, ADCs, bispecifics, mRNA, siRNA, ASOs, PROTACs, molecular glues, cell therapies, gene therapies, radioligand therapies, etc.)

Must Have • Have 5+ years of relevant industry R&D experience (flexible based on depth) • Have taken a program through lead optimization or IND-enabling/preclinical development (nice to have) • Have experience at mid-sized, emerging, or resource-constrained biotech

ideally currently outside the top-20 pharmaceutical companies (nice to have)

This is a hands-on preclinical R&D role

likely not the right fit if your work is mainly CRO/CDMO services, academic-only, QC/analytical-only, clinical-development-only, diagnostics, or regulatory/medical-writing.

Your work will directly feed into the models reshaping how medicines are discovered, helping intelligent systems reason about real-world pharmaceutical R&D.

Here are more details about the role: • You will interface directly with the client team. • This is an ongoing, part-time engagement of roughly 10 hours per week. • Seniority welcome from individual contributor through Director.