Staff Scientist, Immunoassay Development

Vaxcyte is a clinical-stage vaccine innovation company engineering high-fidelity vaccines to protect humankind from the consequences of bacterial diseases, which have serious and costly health consequences when left unchecked. Working to eradicate or treat bacterial infections such as invasive pneumococcal disease, Group A Strep, and Shigella is just the beginning. Our path to success is clear and well-defined, and Vaxcyte is set up to go the distance.

WHAT
we do is every bit as important as
HOW
we do it!

Our work together is guided by four enduring core values:

• RETHINK CONVENTION:
  We bring creative and intellectual diversity to every facet of the work we do in order to innovate and re-innovate the way vaccines are delivered.
• AIM HIGH:
  We embody our collectively audacious goal to courageously make the most complex biologics ever attempted to protect humankind.
• LEAD WITH HEART:
  Everyone leads at Vaxcyte with a kindness-first, inclusive approach to collaboration and vigorous debate that advances our business objectives.
• MODEL EXCELLENCE:
  The magnitude of our challenge requires our shared commitment to demonstrating integrity, accountability, equality and clarity across communications and decision making.

Vaxcyte is seeking an accomplished Staff Scientist, Immunoassay Development to join the CMC Immunoassay group. This role will provide scientific and strategic leadership for the development, qualification, characterization, governance, and lifecycle management of critical reagents and reference materials that support immunoassays across Vaxcyte's vaccine pipeline.

The Staff Scientist will serve as a hands-on technical expert responsible for strengthening Vaxcyte's immunoassay capability across the vaccine pipeline. This includes developing new fit-for-purpose immunoassays, evaluating innovative immunoassay platforms, advancing assay robustness, supporting method transfer and validation readiness, contributing to immunoassay control strategy, and providing senior-level scientific guidance to cross-functional teams.

This is not a primary people-management role. The Staff Scientist may mentor junior scientists and influence technical direction across programs, but the primary accountability is scientific depth, independent technical contribution, experimental strategy, complex data interpretation, and advancement of immunoassay capability.

• Serve as a senior technical expert and individual contributor for immunoassay development across Vaxcyte's vaccine pipeline.
• Lead and directly execute complex laboratory studies supporting immunoassay development, optimization, platform evaluation, qualification readiness, validation readiness, method transfer support, lifecycle management, and routine analytical testing.
• Develop new fit-for-purpose immunoassays supporting potency, antigenicity, identity, impurity, characterization, comparability, release, stability, and lifecycle needs.
• Provide scientific leadership for assay design, including assay format selection, sample preparation strategy, reagent strategy, plate or bead format selection, signal detection approach, system suitability, data analysis model, robustness assessment, and control strategy considerations.
• Evaluate innovative and alternative immunoassay platforms and formats, including ELISA, MSD, multiplex assays, bead-based assays, automation-enabled workflows, and other ligand-binding technologies.
• Design and execute studies to compare assay platforms and translate experimental findings into scientific recommendations for method selection, optimization, and long-term control strategy.
• Independently troubleshoot immunoassay performance trends using structured, data-driven experimental approaches and clear documentation of observations, conclusions, and recommendations.
• Interpret complex immunoassay data, including standard curves, sample interpolation, dilution response, parallelism, recovery, precision, specificity, assay controls, system suitability, robustness, comparability, and long-term method performance.
• Contribute to immunoassay analytical control strategies, including critical reagent strategy, reference material strategy, sample preparation, assay controls, system suitability, bridging approaches, trending, robustness evaluation, and lifecycle monitoring.
• Support routine testing within the CMC Immunoassay, including development-stage testing, characterization testing, platform evaluation studies, comparability…