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People often ask me what it takes to get a job at Isomorphic Labs.
Since our founding more than a year ago, we’ve been in high-growth mode, building our technology platform and recruiting many kinds of people, ranging from chemists to machine learning experts, finance and legal experts, software engineers and biologists, just for starters. We’ve grown exponentially in that time and it’s a rare week here without a group of new starters appearing at our King’s Cross office on a Monday for their first day of work and welcome breakfast.
As Director of Talent Acquisition, I interview a wide variety of people to build our company and very intentionally and thoughtfully build our culture. It’s a given that you must have the technical qualifications or experience to do the jobs for which we’re hiring - but the process of selecting candidates who are technically qualified is weighed equally with choosing candidates who deeply connect with our values to continue to fuel our culture and help us become the extraordinary place we want Isomorphic Labs to be. It’s as much art as science in choosing members of the team.
In my experience, sometimes talented individuals hesitate to apply for roles at companies like Isomorphic Labs, thinking they may not have all the skills and experiences necessary to land a role. Despite all of the impressive and accomplished people who work here, that’s a myth I have to dispel. While we all have to have the necessary skills to play our roles, we are purposefully seeking a diversity of backgrounds and don’t want to make cookie cutter hires. We want diversity of thought, academics, backgrounds, life experience, work experience, stage in career and perspective. While there are many characteristics we look for in the recruiting process, you need not be a genius to apply.
Here’s what I look for, beyond technical skills, when I recruit for Iso:
Experimental Mindset: We are actively looking for candidates to demonstrate a willingness to experiment - to push forward even when we’re not certain we’ll get the right outcome. In conversations, we often probe candidates to draw from their experience to show us that they are willing to explore, to try new things and to take smart, calculated risks. What can you share from your past experience that shows new approaches to getting results?
Humility - One of the things I hear consistently from Isos I’ve recruited is how approachable even the most senior and accomplished colleagues are here. None of us know everything, even when we are experts in our particular domain. We need even the most senior among us to recognize what they don’t know and to continually learn from others in different disciplines who bring new ways of approaching questions and devising solutions. We look for people who bring their expertise, combined with a genuine desire to collaborate with others who know things that they don’t.
“Non-perfectionism” - I don’t mean not caring about doing good work - quite the opposite, actually. I’m talking about a willingness to acknowledge and learn from mistakes, and not be limited by a need to be perfect. Think about mistakes you have made and be willing to speak about what you learned and might have done differently. If we’re not encountering some failure along the way, we’re not thinking expansively enough. We want to ensure that people who join Isomorphic Labs are willing to get out of their comfort zones.
Resilience - This goes hand in hand with acknowledging and learning from past experience, and from things we worked hard to advance but might not have worked out in the end. It can be frustrating to hit dead ends, to change course or to have a hypothesis proven wrong - but sometimes understanding what doesn’t work can lead us to what actually does work. That’s part of the process, and we’re looking for people who can quickly absorb the right lessons from their experiences and keep moving forward together.
Authenticity - An interview can be a stressful experience, in which you have a set period of time to wow an interviewer to be able to pass to the next stage. We want you to be yourself. We want you to bring your whole self to work and to our Iso community. We care who you are, what you’re passionate about and what inspires you to be your best. We’ll all be spending a lot of time together, and it’s so important to be your real self - not the person you think an interviewer wants to see.
Directness - In my experience, there are many times when a candidate doesn’t choose to answer a question directly, because there is something else they want to share with me or they think their answer to the question isn’t what we may want to hear. Take your time and be genuine with your responses. There are no right and wrong answers to many questions we will ask - we are truly interested in hearing about you, your thought process, perspective and experience.
Alignment with Our Values - If you’re interested in a role at Isomorphic Labs, you’ve likely already seen our values on our website. We’re thoughtful. We’re brave. We’re determined. And we’re in this together. They speak for themselves and provide some major clues to the kinds of people we are looking for and behaviours we want Isos to demonstrate everyday as we try to do things in wholly new ways that haven’t been done before. They play a big role in how we operate and the experience our employees have every day. Think about how you can demonstrate that our values are aligned with yours and the examples you can point to from your past work and experiences.
I hope this demystifies the process of landing a role at Isomorphic Labs, and gives you a sense of the kind of people we’re looking for and the environment we are building. We’re on a mission to do groundbreaking work that we truly believe holds a great deal of promise for health and human progress. If what I’ve described appeals to you, we want to hear from you. Come join us - and see this link for our current openings.
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Isomorphic Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, today announced the first phase of its management team. The company, established in November, was launched from Alphabet’s DeepMind to build on the success of AlphaFold, DeepMind’s work in protein folding that was heralded as the “Breakthrough of the Year” by Science and “Method of the Year” by Nature in 2021. Isomorphic Labs’ mission is to use AI and machine learning methods to accelerate and improve the drug discovery process. The company is a pioneer in the emerging field of “digital biology” and aims to usher in a new era of biomedical breakthroughs in order to find cures for some of humanity’s most devastating diseases.
The new leaders join founder and acting CEO Demis Hassabis, who is currently serving as CEO of both DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. Together they comprise a truly multidisciplinary leadership team with expertise in domains across science, engineering, machine learning and business operations that will be needed to achieve the company’s goal of dramatically improving how drugs are discovered and developed. Drug development is currently a lengthy, expensive and high-risk process that is poised to benefit from advances in the application of AI and computational methods. Studies peg the cost of bringing a molecule to market at more than $2.5 billion per drug and timelines approaching a decade; in fact, only about 12 percent of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“We’re thrilled to announce the formation of our extraordinary multidisciplinary leadership team that will allow us to deliver on our ambition to reimagine the entire drug discovery process from first principles, with an AI-first approach,” said Hassabis. “The phenomenal success of AlphaFold demonstrated the huge impact that AI methods can potentially have on biology, and we plan to build powerful new predictive and generative models of biological phenomena to anticipate how drugs will perform and design novel molecules.”
The new additions to the Isomorphic Labs team include:
Dr. Congreve joins as Chief Scientific Officer from Sosei Heptares in the same role, where he pioneered Structure-Based Drug Design for G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). Previously he was director of chemistry at Astex Pharmaceuticals, helping to establish Fragment-Based Drug Design as a radical new approach to small molecule lead generation, and team leader at GlaxoSmithKline in medicinal chemistry and chemical technologies. In his 28-year career, Dr. Congreve has contributed to the design of 20 clinically evaluated drugs and he is co-inventor of Kisqali® (Ribociclib), a marketed treatment for breast cancers. He is co-author of over 180 publications and patents. In 2015, he was co-recipient of the RSC Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize for the seminal contributions to GPCR drug discovery made by Sosei Heptares. Dr. Congreve has a degree in biological chemistry from Leicester University and a PhD in synthetic chemistry from Cambridge University. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Dr. Yakneen joins as Chief Technology Officer, bringing over 20 years of experience in engineering, machine learning, product, life science, and medical research. Prior to this role he was senior vice president and chief technology officer at SOPHiA GENETICS, where he was responsible for the development and operation of a global AI-based molecular diagnostics and imaging software platform operating in more than 70 countries. He’s held senior roles at Amazon, where he launched the first Canadian software engineering center; at BPS Inc., where he developed a best-in-class Governance, Risk, and Compliance platform; at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, where he led the Technical Working Group of the Pan Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Project, the world’s largest cancer data analysis initiative; and at EMBL where he developed a cloud-based scientific workflow framework. Dr. Yakneen holds a degree in computer science and mathematics from the University of Toronto and a PhD in computer science from Heidelberg University, where he developed novel distributed algorithms for analyzing cancer genomes.
Dr. Jaderberg joins as Director of Machine Learning from DeepMind, where he was a research scientist, leading the Open-Ended Learning research team and pioneering numerous algorithms bringing together large-scale deep learning and reinforcement learning to achieve breakthrough results with AI. Prior to that, he was CEO and co-founder of Vision Factory, a company that specialized in image recognition technology with deep learning, which was acquired by Google in 2014 and subsequently became part of DeepMind. He is widely published in the top journals and conferences, with work now part of textbooks. His research interests are in AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning and generative modeling. Dr. Jaderberg completed his undergraduate degree in engineering science at the University of Oxford and his PhD with the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford, where he developed state-of-the-art algorithms for image understanding.
Ms. Richenburg joins as Director of People Operations from Eigen Technologies, where she was senior vice president of people. She is skilled in the development and implementation of innovative people strategies that drive business growth and performance. She has held a variety of human resources roles at companies including Meridian Life Sciences, Bioline and Evotec. Ms. Richenburg is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, medicinal and biological chemistry and earned a master’s degree in human resources management from Oxford Brookes University.
Join us
The company is continuing to scale and is currently seeking talent at various levels with a focus on scientific, engineering and operational roles, along with biologists, medicinal chemists, biophysicists, clinicians, computational scientists, and machine learning experts to contribute to our mission of using AI to accelerate the drug discovery process. For information on open roles, please visit: www.isomorphiclabs.com/join.
Isomorphic Labs is a subsidiary of Alphabet that was launched from Alphabet’s DeepMind in 2021, with headquarters in London. It was founded and is led by AI pioneer Demis Hassabis, who also co-founded and leads DeepMind. As pioneers in digital biology, the company’s mission is to use AI to accelerate drug discovery and ultimately find cures for some of humanity’s most devastating diseases. Using its AI-first approach to drug discovery and biology, the company’s ambition is to advance a new era of medical breakthroughs. For more information, go to www.isomorphiclabs.com.
