Senior Research Scientist - Protein Production Team Lead

At Elanco (NYSE: ELAN) - it all starts with animals!

As a global leader in animal health, we are dedicated to innovation and delivering products and services to prevent and treat disease in farm animals and pets. At Elanco, we are driven by our vision of Food and Companionship Enriching Life and our purpose - all to Go Beyond for Animals, Customers, Society and Our People.

At Elanco, we pride ourselves on fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment. We believe that diversity is the driving force behind innovation, creativity, and overall business success. Here, you'll be part of a company that values and champions new ways of thinking, work with dynamic individuals, and acquire new skills and experiences that will propel your career to new heights.

Making animals' lives better makes life better - join our team today!

As a Senior Research Scientist and Protein Expression & Purification Team Lead in our Transitional and Early Development group, you will play a central leadership role in discovering, generating, and optimizing the next generation of recombinant protein biotherapeutics, including monoclonal antibodies, fusion proteins, and novel vaccine antigens for animal health. In this hybrid laboratory-based and team leadership role, you will direct and expand a team of scientists responsible for the end-to-end protein generation workflow-from DNA construct design through downstream purification and lot-release testing-to enable critical pre-clinical animal studies.

• Team Leadership & People Management:
  Lead, mentor, and develop a team of laboratory scientists focused on the end-to-end protein generation workflow, establishing workload priorities and resource allocation.
• Portfolio & Project Leadership:
  Serve as the protein sciences subject matter expert (SME) across multiple concurrent biotherapeutic and vaccine discovery projects, providing technical leadership, timelines, and risk mitigation strategies.
• Workflow Design & Execution:
  Direct the end-to-end protein generation workflow, from expression plasmid design and transient expression in mammalian systems (HEK
  293, CHO) to multi-step purification strategies utilizing ÄKTA systems and UNICORN software.
• Analytical Characterization & Material Release:
  Oversee a suite of in-process and lot-release analytics (e.g., CE-SDS, HPLC, BLI/Octet, endotoxin) to ensure the delivery of high-purity, low-bioburden protein lots for pre-clinical studies.
• Process Innovation & Documentation:
  Identify and implement platform improvements, including high-throughput systems and automation, while maintaining exemplary data integrity through electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) and technical reports.

• Education:
  
  Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Chemical Engineering, Pharmaceutical Sciences, or a closely related scientific discipline.
• Technical
  
  Experience:
  
  A minimum of 3+ years of hands-on experience in the biopharmaceutical industry or a post-doctoral setting with definitive expertise in mammalian protein expression (e.g., transient expression in CHO, HEK
  293) and multi-step protein purification (e.g., Affinity, IEX, SEC) using automated chromatography systems (e.g., ÄKTA FPLC).
• Project Leadership:
  Experience directing multi-person scientific workflows and mentoring laboratory scientists.

• Team Leadership:
  Prior experience in a formal team lead or people management role.
• Complex Modalities:
  Direct experience engineering, expressing, and purifying complex biologics (e.g., bispecific antibodies, multi-domain fusion proteins, or difficult-to-express…