Director of Marketing, AI-Driven Drug Discovery

Apheris is an AI drug discovery company. We build federated data networks and customizable AI models across co-folding, binding affinity, ADMET, in vivo PK, and antibody developability. Our position is one no one else holds: models trained on proprietary pharma data that no public model can reach, and a platform that puts them to work inside real drug programmes. We already work with 15+ pharmaceutical companies, including 9 of the top 20. 

We are now looking for a Director of Marketing to own how the market understands that.

Our market is named and scientific: a few hundred people across roughly 100 priority accounts, nearly all of them scientists: Chief Scientific Officers and Heads of R&D deciding whether to put part of their pipeline through our AI, and the computational drug discovery, chemistry and structural biology leaders who will test our models against their own targets first. Reach and impressions tell you almost nothing here. What matters is whether those people believe the claim, and whether a partner will put their name beside ours. 

You will own marketing: the strategy, the plan, the budget, and a team of two covering brand and communications, and revenue operations. You will also do the work. Write the argument, brief the designer, sit in the customer call, ship the campaign. At our size, a marketing leader who only directs is one who slows everything down. 

Credibility is the constraint here, not reach. Our buyers check claims against their own data, so the proof has to sit in benchmarks, publications and named results rather than in adjectives. This field produces a lot of marketing fluff and scientists spot it instantly. You will be judged on whether the industry’s understanding of us changed, not on how much you published. If that is the reason you want the job rather than the reason you hesitate, we should talk. 

You will report to our Senior Director, Commercial & Operations, and work closely with product and science leadership, who will hold you to their standard. You are the first senior marketing hire here. What you build becomes how this company markets itself, and the team grows around it.

• 5+ years marketing in drug discovery, or a field close enough that the audience is the same. Domain beats tenure: five years marketing to computational chemists beats fifteen in enterprise software.
• You have marketed to pharma R&D. You know which conferences matter and which are noise, which invite-only meetings and consortia the senior people attend, and which journalists, newsletters and podcasts they read.
• You have run campaigns end to end and owned positioning for a technical product.
• You can read a preprint or a benchmark table and judge what it does and does not prove. You do not need to be a scientist. You do need to hold your own with them.
• You write, and you write well. We look forward to receiving a content piece you write before and we will read it closely.
• You have been among the best at whatever you have done so far, and you know which claims to make, which to hold, and when a quiet quarter is the right answer.
• You are at home in a fast-moving, remote-first company, fluent with AI tools in your own work, and excellent in written and spoken English.

We index on evidence of outlier performance rather than on titles, and we are willing to bet on someone earlier in their career who clearly has it.