Using job posting data gathered via the data aggregation service Apify.com, we sifted through a total of 1,755 recent pharma and biotech job listings to find, unsurprisingly, that managers working in senior and director-level roles are the best-paid in the industry. Across the entire data set, the median salary range for the job descriptions was approximately $113,700 with some falling well beneath that and some significantly higher. Examples of the latter include associate vice president/therapeutic area head ($513,600); head of HIV drugs ($499,100); patent prosecution attorney/counsel ($415,000); head of credit risk compliance ($390,000); and vice president, intellectual property ($380,000).
Across the job listing types, California had more listings than any other geography while Greater Boston was home to the largest concentration of job openings. Check out this page on the subject for more context on biopharma job opening distribution by state. The companies with the most job postings were as follows:
From director-level roles commanding the highest pay to research associates and specialized technicians, data on median and mean salaries for each grouping are broken down below.
Director & Associate Director Roles
Across the data set, Director & Associate Director Roles had the highest offering salaries on average, with a mean maximum (in other words, the average of the upper end of the listed salary range) salary of $230,038.40. This cluster included senior leadership job titles across various functions such as director of health economics, director of external data governance and medical director. Many of these roles require advanced degrees such as MD or PhD or significant industry experience.
- Median Max Salary: $230,750.00
- Mean Max Salary: $230,038.40
- Lowest Max Salary: $80,000.00
Senior & Project Management Roles
This cluster includes a spectrum of management roles albeit with less authority than the preceding one. Sample titles included Sales Manager, Account Manager, Quality Assurance Manager, Finance Manager, and Project/Program Manager — many focused on drug development and clinical trial trials in particular.
- Median Max Salary: $165,748.00
- Mean Max Salary: $164,028.75
- Lowest Max Salary: $65,000.00
Research Scientist & Specialist Roles
With an emphasis on research, data science, and specialized scientific domains such as genomics, immunology and toxicology, this grouping was a distant third in terms of overall compensation. That said, the highest max salary of nearly $253,000 was within striking distance of the top earners in the Senior & Project Management cluster. While the Harvard Business Review declared in 2012 that data scientist was the “Sexiest Job of the 21st Century,” data scientists in tech tend to fare best salary-wise, frequently earning $400,000 or more. In biopharma, data scientist salaries ranged from $96,000 to $193,021 in this dataset.
- Median Max Salary: $120,000.00
- Mean Max Salary: $122,980.27
- Lowest Max Salary: $43,680.00
Research Associate Roles
This cluster primarily consists of Research Associate roles at various seniority levels, with many positions specifying research areas such as imaging, protein therapeutics, cell biology, cancer biology, and assay development. The salary range for these positions is roughly in the middle of the dataset. Research associate job titles in this cluster include Research Associate, Contract Research Associate (In Vivo), Senior Research Associate (Discovery Biology, Laboratory Operations, Protein Sciences), Research Associate II (ddPCR Assay Development) and Staff Research Associate I/II.
- Mean Max Salary: $97,558.91
- Median Max Salary: $99,236.00
- Lowest Max Salary: $47,840.00
Scientist & Microbiologist Positions
Generally comprising more senior roles that the preceding category, this grouping of scientist and microbiologist spans roles across various specialties and seniority levels with title examples including Scientist I/II/III, Microbiologist, Public Health Microbiologist and Medical Writer and spanning the drug development lifecycle.
- Median Max Salary: $96,079.00
- Mean Max Salary: $97,331.68
- Lowest Max Salary: $47,840.00
Specialists and Technicians
This grouping represents something of a miscellaneous category with a preponderance of specialized roles. The cluster has a correspondingly broad range of salaries (the widest in the data set). The job titles span a broad range of functions, including biopharma-related roles in areas spanning business development, quality control, manufacturing, sales, nursing and engineering.
- Median Max Salary: $94,513.00
- Mean Max Salary: $115,869.28
- Lowest Max Salary: $35,360.00
A note on the methodology
The analysis used text processing techniques, including vectorization, to analyze and group job titles in across biopharma. For context, text vectorization is a commonly used technique used for everything from spam detection to semantic analysis search. In the dataset described in this feature, data fields included employers, job titles, location and a variety of other information, but the emphasis focused primarily on job titles. A separate analysis explored the locations of the job listings in more detail. In the above feature, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, then created six distinct clusters out of the vectorized data. The names of the resulting corresponding clusters were based on common characteristics observed in the job titles within that group.
Filed Under: Data science, Drug Discovery, Drug Discovery and Development, Industry 4.0
