By: Donagh Fitzgerald B.Prod Eng and Gerry Creaner B.Chem Eng. Last Updated: October 2023

As a biomedical engineer, you are already well-positioned to apply for biomedical roles within the medical device manufacturing sector. You could also look at roles with pharmaceutical manufacturing companies or in combination products where both pharma and medical device manufacturing overlap.

You generally don’t need any additional training but you may benefit from taking more in-depth courses on pharmaceutical or biopharmaceutical manufacturing if have not covered those areas in detail in your undergraduate program. Typical roles you could apply for are:

• R&D Engineer
• Operations Engineer
• Product Design Engineer
• Device Equipment Engineer
• Combination Product Design
• Manufacturing/Mechatronic Engineering

The majority of roles will be within the medical device manufacturing sector but there may be some roles in pharmaceutical manufacturing as well.

You would have 3 broad options.

Apply for roles with medical device or pharmaceutical manufacturing companies

Polish up your CV/Resume and apply as you are. As a biomedical engineer, you are already in an excellent position to apply for roles, especially within the medical device sector. You could apply for advertised positions or you could send out speculative job applications.

For a list of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers and engineering consultancies, click here if you are in Ireland and here if you are in the United Kingdom. Read this article to see the Top 10 Pharmaceutical & Medical Device Industry Hubs in the USA. For other locations, do a search for engineering consultancies for the pharma or med device sector.

Take our 15-Week Online Starter Validation program and learn to populate an IQ OQ PQ Validation Protocol. 

Validation Protocols form a crucial part of pharmaceutical plant projects and having a fundamental understanding of how these protocols are put together and interpreted is a fundamental skill set of any engineer working in this area.

Options for further study.

Take our 30-week online Certificate in Validation program for More Senior Validation, CQV and C&Q Roles. Get a level 7 university qualification from Technological University Dublin, Ireland and a more interesting job with a higher salary such as;

• Validation Engineer
• Validation Specialist
• CQV Specialist
• C&Q Specialist
• CQV Engineer
• Manager / Associate Manager – QA Validation
• QA Validation Engineer
• Quality & Validation Engineer
• Staff Engineer, Quality/Validation
• Validation Scientist

Retrain to get a better understanding of the plant engineering and validation process used in pharmaceutical companies.

Pharma needs purified water and clean air systems to manufacture safe medicines which are used for injections. These aseptic processes have to be designed, validated, monitored, maintained and updated in FDA regulated manufacturing facilities.

Here, you’d need to take the following programs.

Take our 18-week online Conversion Course into Engineering Roles in Pharma to learn GMPs and how safe medicines are made in a regulated environment and learn the air, water and steam systems that underpin aseptic/sterile processing.

You will receive a strong grounding in the modern pharmaceutical science and engineering concepts of the environmental controls (air) and clean utility systems design that underpin an aseptic manufacturing facility and the quality systems.

Then take our 10-Week Online Starter Validation program to learn how those systems are validated.