Finding a job as a computational scientist in industry -- version 1.0

Introduction

After navigating several job-hunting cycles in the biotech industry, I realized I could have been more deliberate about the criteria I considered when selecting a job. I’ve been incredibly privileged and lucky to find amazing places like insitro and Absci, but I wish I had thought more about what I was looking for at each stage of my career. This blog is an attempt to summarize my thoughts, experiences, and recommendations on job hunting as a computational scientist in the biotech space.

Criteria to consider

We spend a long time of our waking hours at work and I would argue we should be very thoughtful about our career moves. While I could go into detail about many different criterion that you should consider when hunting for a new job, I think Carta’s CTO Will Larson’s blog does the topic far more justice. He argues that at any given point in your career, you will always be balancing multiple personal criterion and you should think about how you want to allocate your rankings within them. The criterion to consider are:

- Personal criteria to consider 
  - Pace
  - Prestige
  - People
  - Learning
  - Profit

Early in your career, prioritize learning, pace, and people to gain experience across disciplines and projects. As you age and take on more responsibilities, profit and prestige will likely become equally important. As you search through job opportunities, you will often find yourself balancing these criteria since it’s unlikely you will find a job that checks all the boxes.

Finding interesting companies

Once you’ve thought about what you want in your next role, you can begin your search. You might already have a few companies in mind, but there are several effective ways to find interesting companies:

1. Tapping into your network : One of the best ways to find new companies is by reaching out to your network. This is easier said than done when you’re just starting out, so I recommend cold emailing folks 3-5 years ahead of you in the same career and asking about their careers and interesting companies.

2. Portfolio pages of biotech VC: Many VC firms (example 1) have portfolio company job boards that list hundreds of open roles. The VC team’s due diligence increases your odds of finding a place with long-term stability.

3. Cold emails: Cold emailing managers or execs within biotech rarely works unless you are a strong match for an open role and have a personal interest in the company. One interesting variation to this is to cold email university professors who spin out a lot of companies on if one of their startups might be a good fit for you potentially.

4. LinkedIn/Google/Social media: I usually find social media to be less than useful in finding companies but sometimes new company announcements etc are more easily discoverable here.

5. Recruiters: As you grow in your career, you will often get interesting recruiters coming your way with new opportunities. Sometimes these could be very interesting opportunities though often they will be offers from your direct rivals.

6. Journal & ML conference submissions: Recently, it has become rather vogue for biotech to submit their computational pipelines and models to ML conferences and scientific journals. Assuming you liked their paper and thought you might be a good fit, this might be a good option for cold emails.

Pro tip: Don’t let a job listing’s set of requirements hinder you from applying. They often represent a wish list more than a hard requirement for any given role.

Evaluating companies

Once you have a list of potential companies, ranking each along several axes might be helpful. Consider these factors:

- Company criteria to consider  
  - Runway 
  - Location 
  - Stage
  - Public vs private 
  - Lab facility 
  - Compute facility 
  - Lab team size/quality  
  - Executive team quality 
  - Growth potential 

1. Runway: There’s significant risk in joining a company with less than a year’s worth of runway. However, finding a company with more than three years of runway is rare unless it’s a large public biotech/pharma.
2. Location: If the job isn’t fully remote, consider the physical location. Are you okay with moving or commuting? Hybrid work schedules are becoming more common, but probe your hiring manager to see if this might change.
3. Stage: Pre-clinical vs. clinical stage companies have different decision-makers and project funding priorities, which can affect your role. This is more common in smaller biotech compared especially if you are hired for a risky capital intensive project and the biotech company’s runway starts to run low.
4. Public vs private: There are pros and cons to joining privately held vs. publicly traded companies. Consider the value of your equity, potential exit opportunities, and company stability. For a publicly traded company, you often have far more stability but a lot of times your equity upside will be limited (unless you are lucky enough to catch a wave like the GLP-1 agonists at Lily or Keytruda at Merck).
5. Lab facility: As as computational scientist, having the ability to validate your predictive models is crucial. If the company is planning to build a lab facility, be prepared for months of potential delays.. Lab facilities are incredibly difficult to build and staff properly in my experience.
6. Compute facilities: Ensure the company has adequate access to CPUs/GPUs and that data flows smoothly. Evaluate their LIMS system and infrastructure. I.e does data still mostly flow via unstructured CSVs and slack messages or do they have infrastructure in place? Depending on what stage of the company you join (or how much they care about modeling), the answer here will vary.
7. Lab team size/quality: Does the biotech have the right lab team in place? Do the lab folks seem excited to collaborate with you? Do they consider you as an equal on the experimental design side or do they seem skeptical of computational tooling. Ask to have at least one potential experimental collaborator on your interview panel and ask open ended questions to probe these things.
8. Executive team quality: Assess whether the executives are successful drug hunters and/or platform builders, can articulate success, possess humility, are open to suggestions, and support their team.. I think evaluating executives on the 5 levels of leadership is often helpful. This is often harder than it looks but again asking open ended questions about growth opportunities, turnover rates, management philosophy etc can help you gauge some of this.
9. Growth potential: It’s hard to judge growth potential. Assume that what you see is what you’ll get and don’t fixate on a location for its “potential”. Are you still able to grow along the criterion listed/ranked above in the length of the company’s runway?

Final thoughts

In Islam, there is a hadith from our Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) that I like that says: “Tie your camel first, and then put your trust in Allah.” Ultimately, you will never really “know” if your job choice was the optimal one. You will have FOMO about jobs not taken and uncertainty and doubt about the ones that you did take. The best you can do is do as much due diligence as possible and then take a leap of faith. In the end, you will be okay.

Sources

https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/