Preclinical R&D Expert – ADC & Bispecifics

Job 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 **ADC and/or bispecific** experts 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 across ADC and/or bispecific programs

- 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

- Have direct experience with **ADCs and/or bispecific (or multispecific) antibodies** — 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 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.