Pharma & Biotech Job Trends Plus New AI/ML Report Preview

Spring hiring activity continues this week with over 1,900 jobs posted despite turmoil with regulators the US. Here are a few trends from last week and a glimpse into our upcoming industry AI/ML report.

Last Week’s Key Findings ¶

• Hiring Leaders: Abbott (252 new postings), followed by Takeda (245 new postings) and Medtronic (242 new postings).

Abbott is always hiring. The top hiring companies are consistent, but more interesting this week is Vertex, which showed a 119% increase in jobs postings compared to its 8-week average. Applications for the Vertex Fall internships and co-ops are live, which is a great path to the industry for recent grads or students. We’re now tracking internships, co-ops, and temporary positions on a new internships job board.

The new Vertex jobs are split about 30% each between Commercial and Research, with the remainder spread across other categories.

We were surprised to see Illumina’s increase in hiring activity. Illumina has faced significant challenges this year with new competition and being placed on China’s unreliable entities list in February. They’ve also had three rounds of layoffs (according to Californa WARN reports) covering about 148 positions in San Diego since October 2024. According to our data, they only have had 14 active jobs over the past two weeks, so I wouldn’t call it a hiring surge, but we’ll keep an eye on Illumina over the next few weeks.

Management vs. Individual Contributor Roles ¶

• Overall Split: 43% management vs 57% individual contributor positions
• Management Focus: Sarepta Therapeutics is investing in leadership, with 93.3% management roles

Salary Feature: Calico Life Sciences ¶

Calico Life Sciences stood out this week with a few new high-paying positions. Calico is an aging/longevity company, focused on interventions to enable people to live longer, healthier lives. Like Verily, Calico is a subsidiary of Alphabet. Right now, there are three high-paying positions available:

• Project Team Leader for drug discovery ($311,000 - $326,000)
• Director of Program Management ($253,000 - $258,000)
• An individual contributor role in Data Science for imaging ($120,000 - $129,000).

These roles are located in South San Francisco.

AI/ML Hiring Landscape ¶

We’ve collected a lot of job posting data over the past several months at PharmaPayWatch, and I’ve started working on a series of industry trend reports based on what companies are trying to hire for. In the next week, I’ll release a AI/ML Hiring Landscape Report. The report will cover:

• Who is hiring AI/ML roles this year?
• What specific skills are in high demand within AI/ML
• Management vs. Individual Contributor breakdowns
• Salary benchmarks for different roles, including location-based benchmarks

While there has been a lot of industry talk about AI/ML in Biotech, it’s challenging to separate the marketing-speak from serious investment. Hiring data tells us who is serious and how they’re actually investing in the field. Here’s a sneak peek from that analysis.

I’ll send an email when this report is available. Thanks for reading this week!

Data from PharmaPayWatch.com | US jobs only | Questions? Reach out to [email protected]