Associate Principal Scientist, Discovery Biologics, Protein Engineering

Job Description

We are on a quest for cures and are committed to be the world’s premier, most research-intensive biopharmaceutical company. Our teams combine leading drug discovery capabilities and world-class R&D with the purpose of turning breakthrough science into life-changing medicines.

We are seeking an energetic and experienced protein engineer for the role of Associate Principal Scientist in the Boston Discovery Biologics group.  The qualified candidate will be a passionate scientific individual contributor who designs large, diverse sets of Biologics and reagents supporting the Boston Discovery Biologics high throughput production team. They will serve as a functional area representative on project teams where they will contribute to therapeutic development through influencing the strategy of Biologic design and production. They will foster the development of junior scientists across Discovery Biologics. The ideal candidate will use their hand-on experiences across Protein Sciences to design multiple therapeutic formats with diverse property sets for high throughput production seeking to identify multiple functional classes pre-optimized leads for therapeutic programs. Using their therapeutic program lead experiences, they will prioritize the right experiments at the right time hence enabling timely go/no-go decisions. Our organization is directly integrating computational and wet-lab researchers with state-of-the-art automation to accelerate the discovery, engineering, and characterization of novel biologics in the pre-IND pipeline. 

They will work closely with Biologic Production and Engineering team members to leverage strengths and identify opportunities to continually expand the team’s technical skillsets and enterprise thinking.  They will work to support the department’s efforts to recruit diverse and highly skilled key talent to the organization and be a champion for diversity and inclusion.  We recognize that the diversity in our team is our strength, and we are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.  Successful candidates must demonstrate inclusive behaviours in working with a diverse group of researchers to drive our core mission.

What you will do:

• Support to Boston’s high-throughput production team through designing up to 100s of Biologics a week

• Develop scalable protein engineering solutions to effectively design, evaluate, and integrate data on sets of multispecifics

• Introduce, apply, and refine sampling strategies for effective evaluation of multispecific sequence and format spaces

• Partner with other protein engineers within Discovery Biologics to share learnings to guide development of internal methodology and tools for protein engineering

• Coordinate with internal and external teams to ensure seamless inputs for high throughput production

• Serve as a functional area representative on project teams where you leverage your deep understanding of protein design and production to advise project teams on strategies to accommodate their unique molecular needs

• Stay abreast of external advancements in the design and production of biologic therapeutics

• Promote the external reputation of our company’s Discovery Biologics

What you will need to be successful in this role:

Qualifications & Experience

• Ph.D. in structural biology, biochemistry, biophysics or related field with 4+ years relevant applied experience, Master's with 8+ years relevant applied experience or Bachelor's with 12+ years of relevant applied experience in biochemistry or related field

• Experience in advancing large molecule therapeutics through discovery pipelines

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

• Strong presentation and publication record

Required skills:

• Extensive protein production experience at varied scales and production strategies for Biologics

• Demonstrated application of structure based, physics based, and/or GenAI/ML approaches of protein engineering approaches to impact therapeutic pipeline programs

• Experience supporting multiple Biologic discovery pipeline projects and platform development initiatives

• Understanding functional and biophysical risks of biologics with the knowledge of when and how to implement strategies to mitigate them

• Champion for diverse and inclusive culture

Preferred skills:

• Extensive design and production experience of complex antigens, protein reagents and Biologic therapeutics modalities beyond antibodies