Remote Pharma Jobs Trend Analysis: Nov - Jan 5, 2025

We analyzed job postings from 11 major pharmaceutical companies to understand remote work trends as we begin 2025. This post examines positions posted between November 2024 and January 5, 2025, providing insights into current remote work policies and opportunities.

Remote Pharma Jobs By the Numbers

Percent of total job postings indicating remote work. Companies posting more than 15% remote jobs are highlighted in green.
Percent of total job postings indicating remote work. Companies posting more than 15% remote jobs are highlighted in green.

Remote work postings accounted for a minority of total jobs posted– only ~10% (195) of the 1,882 jobs we tracked from November 2024 through January 5, 2025 were listed as remote. Within that 10%, the percent of remote jobs posted per company varied between 0% to 28%.

Companies with the most remote friendly roles:

Companies with the least remote friendly roles:

Companies posted significantly different numbers of jobs during this time period, for example Abbott posted the most with 420 roles and Illumina the fewest with only 47. Below, we plotted the total number of jobs vs the percent of jobs that were remote.

Scatter plot of the number of jobs posted vs. percent of posted jobs classified as remote by company. Companies posting more than 15% remote jobs are highlighted in green, and include Illumina, Novartis, and Sanofi.
Scatter plot of the number of jobs posted vs. percent of posted jobs classified as remote by company. Companies posting more than 15% remote jobs are highlighted in green, and include Illumina, Novartis, and Sanofi.

Remote-Friendly Roles

In pharma and biotech, not every role can be performed fully remote. To see what types of roles indicated remote, we used keywords in job titles to group the roles into four categories:

  1. Clinical Operations

    • Clinical Trial Managers
    • CRAs
    • Study Coordinators
    • Compliance, Quality Control, and Monitoring

  2. Data Science & Analytics

    • Biostatisticians
    • Data Managers
    • Statistical Programmers
    • PKDM
    • Computational science

  3. Medical Affairs

    • Medical Writers
    • MSLs
    • Medical Information Specialists

  4. Software & IT

    • Application developers, computing automation
    • Cloud & DevOps engineers
    • IT & security

  5. Research

    • Scientist positions, such as chemists and microbiologists, etc.
    • Post docs
Plot of the percent remote for each of 5 role categories of biotech/pharma jobs
Scatter plot of the number of roles vs percent remote for each of 5 role categories of biotech/pharma jobs
Jobs categorized using keywords in titles into one of 5 role categories. The Medical Affairs category had the highest percentage of remote roles at 46%, while the Research category jobs were the least likely to be remote at only 0.6%. Right/bottom panel shows a scatter plot of the number of jobs vs the percentage remote, grouped by job role category. Most roles posted were categorized as Research and were not remote.

Finding Current Remote Opportunities

If you’re looking for pharma jobs conducive to remote work, look for positions in Medical Affairs and Data Science. Currently, Illumina, Novartis, and Sanofi have the highest proportion of remote positions of the companies we track.

Remote policies can change quickly, use our job board’s remote filter to see the most up to date remote positions. We update listings multiple times daily, directly from company career pages. You can also refer to company pages directly, using the same filter for remote pharma work. Here are direct links for the top remote friendly companies last month:

Methodology

This analysis uses historical and current data from our job board database. The historical data used here spans November 2024 through January 5, 2024. We grouped positions into five broad categories based on keywords in the job titles. For the purpose of this analysis, we excluded “management” positions, such as “Director”, “Lead”, or “Global Lead”.