About Apoha

At Apoha, we are building the Liquid Brain® — a programmable physical sensing platform creating rich, multidimensional fingerprints of materials to unlock faster and smarter material design. Our mission is to redefine how materials are sensed, understood, and designed across industries.

Why Join Us?

We’re Apoha, the team behind the Liquid Brain®.

We're pioneering Sensory Intelligence by decoding molecular behaviour. The first step in our journey to giving machines the senses they never had? Building a Liquid Brain® platform capable of improving life-saving drugs, by assessing the developability of antibodies earlier (those proteins our immune system makes to fight off bacteria and viruses).

We’re a group of scientists, engineers, and operators who’ve built and launched successful products at Goldman Sachs, Apple, Amazon, and published 50+ high impact research papers across biophysics, materials science, and thermodynamics—and been featured by Scientific American as one of “13 Discoveries That Could Change Everything”.

At Apoha, science isn’t just the foundation of our product—it’s woven into our every day. Whether it’s a journal club over coffee, a spirited scientific discussion unravelling a complex problem, or a full-company Quarter Demo Day that sparks wild new ideas, we’ve built a place where academic rigor meets startup energy.

Our team is small, flat, and talent-dense across disciplines. We gravitate towards people who are collaborative, curious, and take pride in owning their work end-to-end. We enjoy spirited debate, thinking way beyond the state of the art, and building products that could change how we understand biological materials—forever. We believe in the power of on-site collaboration, and our UK-based team works together in our London office to foster creativity, speed, and connection.

Our investors include Redalpine, Acequia Capital, Seedcamp, Nucleus Capital, Plug and Play, Wilbe and others—and we’re just getting started.

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation + stock options
• Private health insurance
• Bi-weekly team lunches + regular socials
• The rare chance to shape the DNA of a company
• Access to cutting-edge science, a stellar team, and the chance to change the game

At Apoha, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We strongly encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups in tech and science.

The Role

We are hiring an early career scientist with a strong foundation in computational biology, structural bioinformatics, computational chemistry, biophysics, or systems biology, and the ambition to grow rapidly into scientific leadership. You may be a recent PhD graduate with exceptional aptitude and broad curiosity, or an industry scientist with 3+ years of computational drug discovery / R&D experience seeking a dynamic environment to amplify your growth and impact.

What you'll do

• Develop and expand in-silico molecular representations that capture structural, dynamic, and functional aspects of proteins, antibodies, biologics, and small molecules, with a focus on informing drug discovery and design decisions.
• Apply both state-of-the-art AI/ML models (deep learning, generative models, property predictors) and biophysical/computational chemistry simulations (molecular dynamics, docking, quantum chemistry, free-energy methods) to build predictive models that guide multi-objective design (e.g., potency, stability, selectivity, developability).
• Evaluate the sensitivity, robustness, and predictive power of computational representations against experimental assay data, high-throughput screening results, and simulation outputs; calibrate models to close the loop between prediction and measurement.
• Build frameworks that link molecular representations to structure–function and structure–activity relationships (SAR/QSAR), supporting candidate generation, ranking, and trade-off analysis.
• Shape strategies for computationally guided protein and small-molecule library design, ensuring broad, efficient coverage of relevant biophysical and chemical property space.
• Collaborate with ML, data science, and product teams to deliver reproducible workflows, pipelines, and design tools that make insights accessible to internal users and customers.
• Publish, present, and communicate findings that demonstrate measurable improvements in computational drug discovery, protein engineering, and molecular design outcomes.

Who You Are

• PhD or Master’s in computational biology, structural bioinformatics, biophysics, bioinformatics, computational chemistry, cheminformatics, or a related discipline.
• Essential: Strong proficiency in Python for scientific computing, data analysis, and modelling (experience with scientific libraries such as NumPy, SciPy, scikit-learn, PyTorch or TensorFlow).
• Hands-on experience with machine learning for biomolecular property prediction and/or physics-based modelling (e.g., molecular dynamics, coarse-grained models, statistical mechanics, protein folding/stability, docking, or quantum chemistry).
• Solid grounding in statistics, applied mathematics, and data-driven modelling, with ability to analyse large-scale multi-omics, structural, or chemical datasets.

Important to Have

• Industry drug discovery / biotechnology R&D experience (3+ years) desirable, but exceptional PhD graduates will be considered.
• Evidence of research excellence (peer-reviewed publications, software packages, impactful computational analyses).
• Advantageous: experience with design algorithms (search/optimisation, active learning, generative AI for molecules) and with cloud/HPC workflows or distributed computing.