Introducing the Samba Scientific Biotech Job Board
A Conversation with Samba Scientific CEO Jason Amsbuagh
Highlights:
- To expose young scientists to jobs they are qualified for, but may not have heard about at their academic institutions, Samba Scientific has created a biotech job board that pulls in job listings from 500 companies and institutions from around the world.
- There’s an entire world of biotech jobs out there for which academic researchers have the transferable skills to be successful.
- The Samba Scientific job board ties into a larger goal: to create an engaged community of scientists and support professional growth.
When you study science in school, you’re surrounded by academics. While these folks are typically great educators and researchers, they may not know the range of jobs that are out there for people who are interested in science, but don’t want to continue in academia. This lack of knowledge can make it tough to find a job, let alone one aligned with your interests and skills that pays well.
To expose young scientists to jobs they are qualified for but may not have heard about at their academic institutions, Samba Scientific has created a biotech job board that pulls in job listings from 500 companies and institutions from around the world. Regardless of your interest—working at the bench, product management, sales, human resources, communications, and beyond—there are jobs there for you.
Beyond the volume of jobs available (46,469 at last count), the power of the job board is its customizability. If you want to search by location, including remote, you can. You can also filter results by type of job or job function and view listings from specific companies. If you want to save a search, you can sign up for free email alerts specific to your search.
Say you’re looking for a data science job in Seattle and Philadelphia. Once you do that search, click “Create job alert,” and put in your email, you’ll be notified every time a new opportunity pops up. The job board is entirely free, and signing up for alerts with your email doesn’t mean you’ll get extra messages from us. If you find the right job or are no longer interested in receiving updates, simply one-click unsubscribe via the link in job alert emails.
Now, we’ll hear from Samba Scientific CEO, Jason Amsbaugh. The job board was born out of his personal experience as a science grad trying to make it in Southern California.
Where did the idea for the job board come from?
Jason: As a biochemistry major in undergrad, I did undergraduate research, and I was actually pretty good at it. I won an undergraduate research symposium award, but I also did enough benchwork to know that I didn’t love being under the hood plating Arabidopsis seeds, and that a non-bench job would be better for me.
I got married and had kids soon after graduating college, and because research jobs were what I was most qualified for, I became a biochemist at a drug company. I ran kinase inhibitor assays for their oncology pipeline, and I supported a crystallography core doing protein purification for structural studies.
As a young family in Orange County, California, we had barely enough money get by. As time went on, the combination of a relatively low income, combined with being an extrovert feeling isolated in a laboratory research job, led me to identify and pursue other career opportunities.
I ended up networking with a local sales rep, and I got a job doing technical sales in academic medical centers. The difference in income, although relatively modest, was transformative for me and my family, and it allowed us to buy a car and to rent a nice apartment when we lived in L.A., and then ultimately to move to Colorado and buy a home and have more children.
Since then, I’ve always worked for life science companies, with roles in sales, product management, strategy, and marketing. My academic background was incredibly important in giving me the toolset to work in technical fields like genomics, oncology, and molecular diagnostics. Along the way, I’ve worked with hundreds of clients and colleagues that were trained as scientists but moved into industry, people that have found a way to bridge their academic training with opportunities in industry, achieving professional and financial rewards along the way.
So, there’s an altruistic intent here: to show academic researchers the great world of all of the jobs and the possibilities that exist within industry that they may not know that they’re qualified for or may not even know exist, and to help those researchers uplevel their careers and achieve their personal and professional goals.
Who is the job board for?
Jason: There are a lot of people, specifically researchers, that don’t like sales, and that’s totally fine. But there’s an entire world of jobs in quality, clinical laboratories, manufacturing, process development, diagnostic development, and research tools out there. Especially if you’re like me, coming out of a state school that was focused on ag-based research, you just don’t have exposure or and understating of what those types of jobs are, at all.
Plus, there’s this focus on what people do for their graduate studies—to be an expert in something a mile deep and an inch wide. They overlook a lot of transferable skills and just general knowledge that could really be applied across all of sorts of industry jobs.
How can companies who are interested get involved?
Jason: If companies are interested in being listed, they can reach out to us directly, and we can add their career listings to the directory.
The job board is not meant to be an easy-apply platform. It’s really meant for people to find out about opportunities and to be able to learn more and click through the company websites. We’re not selling subscriptions. We’re not collecting recruiting fees from companies. At this point, it’s just a free resource for job seekers to use.
What does the future of the job board look like?
Jason: We are currently at 500 companies, and it’s easy to imagine that we could double that in the next few months. I think it’s already the biggest job board in this vertical, but it will continue to get bigger and bigger.
It also ties into a larger goal: to create an engaged community of scientists. We thought a job board would be a great first step because when you’re early in your career, a job is something that everybody needs. This is the first step towards building out a greater platform that not only connects people to each other online, but then moves to in-person conferences and meetups. We seek the betterment of the world through sharing of novel biotechnologies and getting access to those tools and techniques to scientists both in places like the Midwest, as well as developing countries. It’s a big reach from where it’s at today, but, ultimately, that’s the direction I’d like to see this community develop.
You can check out the job board today, and search for your next job among thousands of listings from 500 biotech companies. Set up custom alerts to go straight to your email.