Senior Scientist; Organic Chemist-Oligonucleotide Delivery

Career Category

Research

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.

Senior Scientist (Organic Chemist‑Oligonucleotide Delivery)

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated organic chemist to join us in developing the next generation of RNA therapeutics and expand the synthetic capabilities of the Genetic Medicines group. This role supports Amgen’s pipeline of siRNA‑based therapeutics. The chemist will be part of our oligonucleotide delivery team and utilize state‑of‑the‑art methods to design and prepare novel delivery ligands, conjugation linkers, and nucleotides to chemically modify oligonucleotides for enhanced delivery and efficacy.

The ideal candidate will have a diverse organic chemistry skillset with experience in small molecule and carbohydrate synthesis.

The candidate should be motivated to expand their skillset, have a flexible mindset and willing to learn oligonucleotide chemistry. The candidate will be responsible for performing hands‑on ligand, linker/spacer, nucleotide, and oligonucleotide synthesis at mg‑to‑gram scales, including designing, purifying, analyzing synthetic products and optimizing synthetic protocols.

The role will include chemically modifying oligonucleotides and interacting with our diverse team of oligonucleotide chemists, conjugation chemists, protein chemists, and biologists to help discover novel delivery mechanisms and contribute to our therapeutic RNA pipeline.

• Design and prepare novel delivery ligands, conjugation linkers, and nucleotides to chemically modify oligonucleotides for enhanced delivery and efficacy.
• Develop and optimize synthetic routes and purification strategies of molecular targets.
• Drive technical execution of projects from start to finish and perform hands‑on synthesis, isolation, and characterization of molecules.
• Synthesize oligonucleotides that incorporate novel synthetic moieties and conjugate novel linkers and ligands to improve tissue distribution and stability.
• Develop scalable and reproducible workflows that support therapeutic platform advancement.
• Serve as a chemistry subject‑matter expert (SME) in cross‑functional team meetings.
• Train as needed, collaborate with the Genetic Medicines group and cross‑functional teams to meet project objectives and timelines.
• Prepare research results for presentations, patent applications, and scientific publications.

We are all different, yet we all use our unique contributions to serve patients. The successful candidate will bring strong expertise in organic chemistry and will work at the interface of molecular design, analytical characterization, and platform innovation. This scientist will collaborate across multidisciplinary teams to develop robust oligonucleotide synthetic modification technologies that improve therapeutic performance, stability, manufacturability, and translational potential.

The passionate and dedicated professional we seek is a motivated research scientist with these qualifications.

Doctorate degree

OR

Master’s degree in synthetic organic…