Principal Scientist, AI Co-Scientists - Synthetics Development

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Job Function:
Data Analytics & Computational Sciences

Job Sub Function:
Data Science

Job Category:
Scientific/Technology

All Job Posting Locations:
Beerse, Antwerp, Belgium

Job Description:

Principal Scientist, AI Co-Scientists - Synthetics Development

Why this role matters:

The future of small-molecule discovery and development depends on both translating scientific challenges into trustworthy AI-enabled capabilities and creating the data, information, and knowledge foundations on which those capabilities depend.

This role will help Synthetics Development build and evaluate practical solutions spanning data science, machine learning, generative AI, information retrieval, document understanding, structured knowledge, and agentic workflows.

Position Summary

In this role, you will work at the interface of small-molecule science, data science, and artificial intelligence.

In close partnership with chemists, analytical scientists, formulation scientists, process engineers, data scientists, and technology teams, you will investigate, prototype, and evaluate AI-enabled capabilities that address priority scientific challenges.

The role combines two closely connected responsibilities.

You will de-risk new ideas through hands-on experimentation, focused technical spikes, and limited-scope proofs of concept.

You will also design and implement the document-processing, metadata, retrieval, structured-data, ontology, and knowledge-graph components required to make scientific information usable by these solutions.

In both areas, you will translate scientific needs into testable technical approaches and make feasibility, limitations, dependencies, risks, and potential value visible before broader investment.

Working as part of a cross-functional team, this role will contribute to scientific co-scientists, intelligent search, scientific data products, workflow automation, decision-support tools, and agentic workflows.

The work will span practical experimentation and the implementation of reusable information foundations, including ingestion and document understanding, metadata and entity extraction, retrieval, controlled vocabularies, ontologie...