Director of Marketing, AI-Driven Drug Discovery

About Apheris

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.

About the role

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.

About you

What you will do

Campaigns and narrative

• Own positioning and narrative: the category we lead, the arguments behind it, and the discipline that makes every announcement land as proof of that story rather than as isolated news.
• Build end-to-end campaigns. Take one launch or one argument and carry it across every channel that reaches our buyers, from press and scientific media to newsletters, podcasts, events, partner channels, social and sales material, so the market hears one message repeatedly instead of a series of unconnected posts.
• Spearhead the creative. It belongs everywhere: in how a campaign is built, how a result is visualized, how an event is designed, how the website reads. Bring ideas we would not have come up with ourselves, and push them further than this industry is used to.
• Run launches: platform releases, network milestones and partner announcements, with partner amplification agreed in advance rather than hoped for. Scientific and product marketing
• Turn our science into proof. Work with our scientists and academic partners to translate model results, benchmarks and publications into claims that hold up under technical scrutiny, and correct the misconceptions that persist about what our models do and what the public alternatives can and cannot deliver. Write the sharpest arguments yourself.
• Lead product marketing for our platform and the workflows that run on it: the narrative, the pages, and the pitch. Bring what you learn from the market back into product decisions.
• Own the competitive picture, and equip the commercial team with proof points, references and benchmark write-ups that survive a technical buyer.

Reaching our buyers

• Own marketing to R&D leadership. Build the formats that reach CSO, SVP and VP level around Foundry: peer proof, third-party voices, invite-only round tables and reference stories.
• Own the event strategy, weighted to scientific conferences, symposia and closed executive formats rather than commercial booths. Decide where we appear, win the speaking slots, and run our own invite-only round tables and dinners, including doing the inviting yourself.
• Own our channels and the relationships behind them: scientific outlets, newsletters, podcasts, the journalists who cover this field, and our social presence across organic and paid. Team, budget and standards
• Set the demand strategy for this named-account market. Direct growth marketing across outbound, paid and search, and hold marketing accountable for its contribution to pipeline. Revenue operations, including our CRM and reporting infrastructure, reports into you, but it is not work you need to run hands-on.
• Own the plan, the priorities and the budget. Lead and grow a team of two, and bring in freelancers, design studios or specialists where they add leverage while the core capability stays in house. You are savvy in leveraging AI to complete work tasks where this is more cost-effective and efficient.

What we expect from you

• 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.

Nice to have

• Experience in an early-stage or scale-up environment.
• A degree or working background in chemistry, structural biology, bioinformatics, or a related field.
• Experience marketing AI or machine learning products into pharma R&D.
• Familiarity with federated learning, privacy-enhancing technologies, or multi-party data collaboration.
• Experience running co-marketing with large technology or pharma partners.

What we offer you

• Industry-competitive compensation, including early-stage virtual share options.
• Remote-first working, so you work where you work best, whether from home or a co-working space near you.
• Great suite of benefits, including a wellbeing budget, mental health benefits, a work-from-home budget, a co-working stipend, and a learning and development budget.
• Generous holiday allowance.
• Office Days at our Berlin HQ or a different European location (3x a year).
• A fun, diverse team of mission-driven individuals with a drive to see AI and ML used for good.
• Plenty of room to grow personally and professionally.

Logistics

Our mission statement