Come for the science. Stay for the people.
5,400 people, six US sites, six values we argue about and a seventh we have never agreed on, eight employee resource groups and a 12-hour shift pattern that runs through Christmas. Here is the honest version, including the parts that are hard.
Six sentences we actually use in meetings
Values are worthless if nobody quotes them under pressure. These get quoted, usually by someone disagreeing with someone more senior.
Patients set the clock
Not the quarter, not the conference calendar. When we debate a timeline, the question is what it costs someone waiting for the medicine — and sometimes the answer is that going slower is the right call.
Evidence over ego
The most senior person in the room is not the most correct by default. We expect the data to be shown, including the awkward data, and we expect people to change their minds out loud.
Right the first time
In a plant, rework is not just cost, it is a batch a patient does not get. Stopping the line is always the right call if you are unsure. We have never disciplined anyone for a stop that turned out to be unnecessary.
Lift as we climb
Managers are assessed on the people they develop and export, not only on the ones they keep. Every promotion panel asks who you have made ready to take your job.
Own the outcome
Handoffs are where medicines die. If you pass something on, you stay on the hook until someone has genuinely caught it.
Should comes before could
Our bioethics board has a standing veto over any program, and has used it four times — twice on work that was scientifically thrilling and commercially attractive. Anyone here can put a proposal in front of it, including about our own ancient-DNA work, and the minutes are published internally in full.
And one we are still arguing about
Whether "move fast" belongs on this list at all. Half the company says our sector kills people by being slow; the other half says it kills people by being sloppy. The debate is now an annual fixture at our leadership offsite and we quite like that it is unresolved.
Hybrid where it helps, onsite where it matters, remote where it works
There is no single answer for a company that runs both a discovery campus and two 24/7 sterile plants, so we stopped pretending there was.
- Site-based office roles
- Three days a week onsite: Tuesday, Wednesday and one team-chosen day. Teams pick their own third day and publish it, so you always know when the building is busy.
- Lab, plant and quality roles
- Onsite by nature. What we control instead is predictability: shift rotas are published eight weeks ahead, swaps are handled by the site scheduling team, and overtime is offered before it is assigned.
- Fully remote roles
- About 8% of colleagues work fully remotely today, but a third of what we are hiring right now is remote — 75 of our 225 open roles, largely field medical, commercial, clinical operations and some data roles. Every posting states its model on the first line, and we do not change it after you join without your agreement.
- Shift patterns
- 12-hour rotations, typically 3-on/4-off alternating with 4-on/3-off, days and nights. Differentials of 12–20% explained here.
- Meetings
- No internal meetings before 09:00 or after 16:00 local time, no recurring meeting without an agenda, and Thursday afternoons are company-wide focus time with nothing in the calendar. Thursday 09:00 to 10:00 is also blocked company-wide, for reasons explained below.
- Time zones
- We span Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific. Recurring meetings rotate their timing quarterly so the West Coast is not always the one dialling in at 06:00.
What people tell us in exit interviews
We publish this internally every quarter, so it would be odd to hide it here.
- Shift work is genuinely hard. Nights are the most common reason people leave manufacturing. We have improved the rota and the differentials; we have not made nights easy and we probably cannot.
- We are matrixed. Program teams cut across functions, so influence matters as much as authority. People who like clean reporting lines sometimes find it frustrating.
- Cambridge is expensive. Our pay ranges are geo-adjusted but Boston housing is what it is, which is partly why so much of our growth is in Bloomington and RTP.
- Regulated work means documentation. If you find writing things down tedious, a GMP environment will be a long few years.
We stop the entire company for an hour every week to throw balls at each other
Company-wide dodgeball. Every Thursday, 09:00 to 10:00, at every site and on video for remote colleagues, who mostly spectate and heckle.
It began in 2014 as a two-team grudge match between process development and quality at Boulder, over a disagreement about a filtration step that neither side now remembers the details of. It spread. It is now on the corporate calendar as a recurring hold that nobody has the authority to delete, and it is the only meeting in the company with a 96% attendance rate.
It is, straightforwardly, terrible for business on Thursday mornings. Nothing decisive gets decided before 10:30. External calls are not booked before 11:00. Our commercial leadership has twice proposed moving it to Friday afternoon and has twice been voted down by a margin that surprised them.
It is, equally straightforwardly, excellent cardio. It is also the only hour of the week where a principal scientist, a materials handler and someone from legal are on the same team and the hierarchy is entirely determined by who can catch.
- Optional, genuinely — roughly 62% of colleagues play, the rest watch, referee or enjoy an unusually quiet building
- Manufacturing runs a separate bracket on the shift pattern, so nights are not excluded
- Soft balls only, following an incident in 2017 that is now covered in EHS induction
- Injuries are reported through the normal EHS process, which makes our safety statistics more interesting to explain than they should be
- The trophy is a 500 mL beaker with a name etched on it. Devens has held it for three years and is unbearable about it
Our “gym” is a room with mats and kettlebells
Every site has one. It contains yoga mats and kettlebells. That is the complete inventory. There is no treadmill, no rowing machine, no climbing wall and no smoothie bar, and we would rather tell you that now than have you discover it in week two.
Two facilities reviews have recommended expanding it. Both were deprioritised in favour of spending the money on the plant, which is probably the right call and is definitely the recurring argument.
If you want equipment that plugs in, the $1,000 wellbeing stipend covers a membership somewhere that has it. Between the kettlebells and the dodgeball, a surprising number of people never bother.
Eight ERGs, and they have actual budget
Every ERG has an executive sponsor from the leadership team, a real budget, and chapter leads with 10% of their working time formally protected for the role. 47% of colleagues belong to at least one. All are open to everyone.
SALUTE
Veterans, Guard and Reserve, spouses and supporters. Runs the peer sponsor programme for every military-connected joiner and the monthly resume clinic. Authored our 24-month differential pay policy. More about SALUTE.
WISE
Women in Science and Enterprise. Sponsorship pairs, the returner programme, and the pay-equity review that we now run annually with an external firm.
BEACON
Black colleagues and allies. Runs our HBCU recruiting partnerships and the Cambridge and RTP STEM mentoring programme in local high schools.
PRISM
LGBTQ+ colleagues and allies. Drove our gender-affirming care coverage and the equal treatment of domestic partners across every benefit.
ASPIRE
Asian and Pacific Islander colleagues. Strongest presence in our research organisation at Cambridge and San Diego; runs the relocation buddy network and our Lunar New Year and Diwali observances.
UNIDOS
Hispanic and Latino colleagues. Bilingual patient-materials review, and the Bloomington and RTP community college pipeline into our apprenticeship.
ENABLE
Disability, chronic condition and neurodiversity. Rewrote our interview process to offer written questions in advance as standard, and audits our internal tools for accessibility.
PARENTS+CARE
Parents and carers. The reason backup care days went from 10 to 15 and the reason our phased return exists at all.
GENESIS
Early-career colleagues in their first five years. Runs the intern buddy scheme, the reverse mentoring programme, and a lot of the social calendar.
Eleven sites in nine countries
Where the roles actually are. Headcount figures are approximate and as of January 2026.
Global headquarters & discovery
~1,450 colleagues. Research labs, translational science, clinical development, data science, corporate functions and the executive team. Two connected buildings on Kendall Commons with a rooftop greenhouse nobody can quite justify but everyone defends.
The lobby holds a cast of a Triceratops skull, donated by a founder in 2009 as a joke about the company name and now genuinely beloved. Every intern cohort photograph since has been taken in front of it. Meeting rooms are named after extinct species — Dodo, Thylacine, Archaeopteryx, Steller — and booking Thylacine for a project kickoff is considered bad luck.
Biologics drug substance
~1,180 colleagues. Our largest manufacturing site: cell culture through 2,000L single-use bioreactors, purification, buffer and media prep, plus the North American distribution centre. Runs 24/7 on 12-hour rotations. Building 4 has been called the Paddock since it opened, because its bioreactor suites are laid out in a ring around a central corridor. The sign on the door is unofficial and nobody has ever taken it down.
Drug product & sterile fill-finish
~890 colleagues. Aseptic filling, lyophilisation, visual inspection, packaging and serialisation, with the QC laboratories that support them. Our fastest-growing US site — 210 hires in 2025.
Clinical development & digital
~760 colleagues. Clinical operations, biostatistics and programming, data management, pharmacovigilance, enterprise IT and a growing commercial hub.
Process development & protein engineering
~420 colleagues. Where a molecule becomes a manufacturable process: upstream and downstream development, analytical development, tech transfer and our pilot plant.
Genomics & functional screening
~280 colleagues. Functional genomics, high-throughput screening, single-cell and spatial biology feeding target selection for all four therapeutic areas — plus the nine-person Ancient DNA & Paleogenomics group, who work out of a clean suite everyone calls the Amber Room and who would like it noted that they reconstruct enzymes, not animals.
Across the United States
~420 colleagues who do not report to a site. Field medical scientists across 22 territories, field commercial teams, and fully remote colleagues in clinical operations, data, regulatory and corporate functions.
75 of our 225 open roles are fully remote, and every posting states its model on the first line. Roles marked portable move with you if you receive PCS orders.
What we do with our time and money
Two paid Impact Days a year, donation matching up to $5,000 a year per colleague, and 41,000 volunteer hours logged in 2025.
- Patient organisations. Every program team spends time with the patient community it serves. New joiners in clinical, commercial and manufacturing hear from a patient in their first month — it is the part of induction people remember years later.
- STEM in our communities. Lab programmes with 22 high schools near our sites, paid summer placements for 40 students a year from schools where most pupils would be first in their family to attend university.
- Community college partnerships. Ivy Tech in Bloomington, Wake Tech in RTP and Mount Wachusett in Devens feed directly into our apprenticeship and technician roles.
- Access programmes. Our patient assistance programme supported roughly 6,800 patients last year, and CRETALYN is supplied at no cost to any workplace that can demonstrate an open-plan seating plan and a shared fridge.
- Emergency response. The colleague hardship fund makes grants of up to $5,000 within 72 hours, decided by a panel of colleagues rather than by HR.
An unofficial society of about 90 colleagues who spend their Impact Days at public fossil digs in Wyoming, Montana and the Isle of Wight, and who have adopted three museum education programmes near our sites. It started in 2011 when two process engineers took the joke about the company name entirely too seriously, and it has since sent 14 people's children to a palaeontology summer camp. Membership requires no qualification and no dignity.
Because a biologics plant is a very thirsty building
- Carbon neutral in our own operations since 2024; net zero across the value chain targeted for 2040
- 100% renewable electricity at all six sites since 2023
- Water use per gram of drug substance down 34% since 2019 — a target the Devens process engineering team set themselves
- Single-use plastics: 71% of bioprocess consumables now recycled or recovered
- Cold chain redesign cut air freight emissions per shipment by 28% in two years
Illustrative figures for a fictional company.
Four Wednesdays
05:40 — Devens, drug substance
Anika, Manufacturing Associate II, day shift. Gowning by 06:15, handover from nights at 06:30 — twenty minutes, every parameter walked through out loud. Two bioreactor inoculations before lunch, a sampling round, then forty minutes writing up because the batch record does not fill itself. Off at 18:30, four days off starting Friday.
08:15 — Cambridge, discovery
Tom, Senior Scientist, immunology. Program review at 09:00 where a negative result kills a hypothesis he has held for eight months, which is annoying and also the point. Afternoon in the lab, an hour mentoring a returning intern, and a 16:00 argument with process development about whether his molecule can actually be made.
10:00 — remote, Nashville
Renée, Clinical Trial Manager. Three site calls before noon, one of them about an enrolment shortfall that needs escalating today rather than at Friday's meeting. School run at 15:00, back online at 16:30 for the West Coast calls. Onsite in RTP one week in six.
13:20 — Bloomington, QC micro
Marcus, QC Analyst II. Environmental monitoring reads, an out-of-spec result that turns into a two-hour investigation, and the quiet satisfaction of finding the actual cause: a door interlock on a two-second delay. Writes it up properly. Leaves at 17:00.