Scientist / Senior Scientist, Structural Biology

Career Category

Job Description

Join Amgen’s Mission of Serving Patients

At Amgen, if you feel like you’re part of something bigger, it’s because you are. Our shared mission—to serve patients living with serious illnesses—drives all that we do.

Since 1980, we’ve helped pioneer the world of biotech in our fight against the world’s toughest diseases. With our focus on four therapeutic areas –Oncology, Inflammation, General Medicine, and Rare Disease– we reach millions of patients each year. Amgen is advancing a broad and deep pipeline of medicines to treat cancer, heart disease, inflammatory conditions, rare diseases, and obesity and obesity-related conditions.

As a member of the Amgen team, you’ll help make a lasting impact on the lives of patients as we research, manufacture, and deliver innovative medicines to help people live longer, fuller happier lives.

Our award-winning culture is collaborative, innovative, and science based. If you have a passion for challenges and the opportunities that lay within them, you’ll thrive as part of the Amgen team. Join us and transform the lives of patients while transforming your career.

Scientist / Senior Scientist, Structural Biology

What you will do

Let’s do this. Let’s change the world. In this vital role you will help discovery teams tackle challenging mechanistic questions by developing practical structural biology strategies, enabling high-quality structural analysis, and delivering insights that support therapeutic program decisions. This position offers a unique opportunity to combine hands-on structural biology with technology innovation in support of biologics and small-molecule drug discovery across multiple therapeutic areas.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with discovery teams to evaluate samples, define structural biology strategies, and develop fit-for-purpose experimental plans.
• Perform and guide cryo-sample preparation, grid optimization, screening, data collection, image processing, model building, refinement, and structural interpretation.
• Deliver high-quality structural insights that inform mechanism of action, molecular design, and therapeutic decision-making.
• Develop scalable, reproducible CryoEM workflows that improve throughput, robustness, and data quality.
• Collaborate across Structural Biology, Protein Sciences, Therapeutic Discovery, Protein Engineering, Computational Biology, Medicinal Chemistry, Automation, Molecular Characterization, and therapeutic area teams.
• Coordinate activities across internal facilities, external collaborators, and instrument vendors to maximize platform performance.
• Evaluate and implement emerging technologies—including automation and AI-enabled tools—to improve data collection, analysis, and workflow efficiency.
• Apply complementary structural biology approaches, including X-ray crystallography, MicroED, electron tomography, and integrative structural biology, where appropriate to address scientific questions.
• Support and/or lead CryoEM platform activities at the South San Francisco site, including operation of the 200 kV Glacios 2 and user support for the 300 kV Titan Krios.
• Contribute to scientific innovation through technology development, publications, presentations, and knowledge sharing.

What we expect of you

We are all different, yet we all use our unique contributions to serve patients. The Scientist we seek is a researcher with these qualifications.

Basic Qualifications:

Doctorate degree PhD in Structural Biology, Biochemistry, Biophysics, or a related field.

OR

PharmD

OR MD [and relevant post-doc where applicable]

OR

Master’s degree and 3 years of Structural Biology experience

OR

Bachelor’s degree and 5 years of Structural Biology experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with X-ray crystallography, MicroED, electron tomography, or integrative structural biology.
• Experience supporting structure-based drug discovery in an industry setting.
• Experience studying membrane proteins, antibodies, multispecifics, GPCRs, or other challenging therapeutic targets.
• Experience developing new methodologies that improve throughput, reproducibility, or success rates.
• Familiarity with automated data collection software such as EPU.
• Experience mentoring scientists or training CryoEM users.
• Record of scientific publications, presentations, or technology innovation.
• Passion for collaborative science and continuous improvement.
• Experience scripting/coding with Python and/or other programming langua