Many of the job cuts in 2024 are in Massachusetts, but the state still has one of the densest concentrations of job listings based on a dataset of more than 3,300 online job postings from May. Yet the Northeast Megalopolis excluding the Bay State was home to more jobs overall, with states such as New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania jointly accounting for more than 60% more listings than Massachusetts.
Other notable hubs for job listings include Southern Illinois, the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and the Research Triangle in North Carolina. Smaller pockets of biopharma jobs appear in cities such as Seattle, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Tampa and Baton Rouge.
Drug Discovery & Development has churned out a variety of maps recently highlighting the biopharma sector, including one showing layoff hotspots and a global breakdown of VC funding, layoffs and new plant announcements that includes some hiring data as well. For a breakdown of top-paying job title types across pharma, check out “Pharma and biotech salary review: Who’s earning the most in 2024?”
Senior roles occur frequently in job postings
The most common job posting in the dataset was research associate followed by validation engineer and microbiologist titles. As of mid-May, research associate listings were more likely to be in hubs such as Boston, San Francisco and San Diego, while validation engineers were more common in pharma manufacturing hubs such as New Jersey and North Carolina. Some roles, such as Research Assistants and Scientists, were more common in academic research settings and specialized research centers or universities.
Among the thousands of listings, a significant number were for senior roles as the bar chart below shows. “Manager” and “senior” were each mentioned more than 500 times in job titles. “Director” was mentioned 399 times. The image below shows the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) score for the top terms. TF-IDF is a statistical measure that gauges how relevant a word is to a document. TF-IDF and simple word counts measure different things. TF-IDF considers the term’s importance relative to the entire dataset, while word counts simply counts occurrences.
Breakdown of best-paid open pharma positions
While many job postings did not include salary information, the ones that did reinforced the fact that the top-paying jobs tend to be concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston/Cambridge, New York City/New Jersey and San Diego. California was home to the top-paying maximum salaries with especially high-paying open positions including vice president of intellectual property at a gene therapy company and lead the HIV drug development team at a global pharmaceutical giant. Several of the salaries in the Bay Area exceeded $300,000.
In San Diego, high demand for expertise in areas like toxicology and immunology is reflected in the salaries offered for roles like senior director of toxicology, reaching up to $260,000. Bioinformatics, a field experiencing swift growth, also commands top dollar, with positions like bioinformatics scientist II offering salaries up to $190,000.
The most commonly occurring pairs of words in job titles.
In Boston/Cambridge, there were a number of high-paying open positions in medical affairs, research and clinical development. Senior medical director roles focused on critical areas like pharmacovigilance and drug safety command salaries surpassing $300,000. Additionally, leadership positions within global pharmaceutical companies have salaries in the same range.
Other examples of high-paying positions across the country include a New Jersey–based associate vice president/therapeutic area head focusing on cardiovascular & respiratory with a max salary of more than $500,000. Regional business director roles at Big Pharma firms also pay well with salaries sometimes exceeding $250,000.
The map below filters for select open positions related to either pharma or biotech with a max salary of at least $100,000 annually.
A note on the methodology and data source: While the listings in the dataset provide a snapshot, the data is by no means exhaustive. Consider that a single biopharma giant could have hundreds of job postings. Data was retrieved using queries for “pharma” and “biotech” and for searching for open positions at prominent Big Pharma companies across the U.S. The resulting dataset included a handful of OUS locations as well, but the vast majority were domestic. Location data (city names) were converted into coordinates using the Google Maps API. Data manipulation was based on open-source Python tools. The underlying data is not exhaustive and does not cover all possible job postings. While a dataset of more than 3,300 entries is substantial, a single Big Pharma may have hundreds of job postings at any given time.
Filed Under: Drug Discovery and Development
