03/09/2026
Where can Petroleum Engineers work in the pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing industry?
👉Your undergraduate qualifications and work experience should equip you with the necessary skills and knowledge to apply for entry-level or mid-level process or chemical engineering roles in pharma.
You could also look at process engineering roles with medical device manufacturing companies.
Engineering consultancies could be another option for finding these types of roles.
In general though, it is difficult to anticipate how HR or Hiring Managers will react to your qualifications or your lack of experience working in a GMP-regulated manufacturing environment. For some, this may prove to be a stumbling block so you may need to take a Good Manufacturing Practices course to address that.
👉 A second option would be to retrain for validation and qualification roles as your background in engineering design and interpreting P&ID technical drawings are highly relevant to this field.
👉 A third option would be to retrain for plant engineering or maintenance-type roles.
Apart from the general "Process Engineer", "Chemical Engineer" or "Senior Process Engineer" job titles, here are some typical sub-category job titles we often see advertised:
➤ Process Engineer (Tech Transfer) - the focus is generally on managing the move of a production process from one facility to another.
➤ Process Engineer (Upstream) - upstream activities are stages of biopharmaceutical processing up to the cell-culture or fermentation process that is used to make the target proteins.
➤ Process Engineer (Downstream) - downstream activities are the stages of processing that come after cell culture or fermentation. These stages include separation and purification to achieve the required drug product.
➤ Process Engineer (Fill Finish) - the focus is on formulating the licensed product using the drug substance and other excipients, filling, lyophilization and testing, including ongoing stability testing.
There are also other subcategories where we see a lot of the job descriptions overlap with other engineering disciplines such as mechanical, plant or validation engineering:
➤ Process Engineer (EHS) - focus on environmental, health and safety
➤ Process Engineer (Facilities) - focus is on the design and maintenance of HVAC, air handling, water and steam systems within a plant
➤ Process Engineer (C&Q) - focus is on commissioning and qualification of equipment and systems and populate validation protocols
(Note: These suggestions are based on spending almost 8 years putting together both Ireland's and the UK's largest pharma jobs boards, but there are always exceptions.)
Learn more about moving into pharma as a petroleum engineer in this post - https://www.getreskilled.com/engineer/petroleum/
If you are interested in learning how to populate a qualification protocol, check out our Starter Validation Course at this link. https://www.getreskilled.com/iq-oq-pq/
If you want a proper course on Good Manufacturing Practices, check out our GMP Training for Beginners in Pharma at this link - https://www.getreskilled.com/gmp-training/
