Norwood's Moderna Campus Offering $10K Singning Bonuses

NORWOOD, MA - Moderna Inc. is offering $10,000 sign-on bonuses for certain senior-level hires at its Norwood facility as it works to rapidly ramp up its headcount there as its campus expands.

The biotech firm is offering the hiring incentive for senior manufacturing associates, Level II manufacturing associates, senior quality control and assurance specialists, and Level II quality control and assurance associates.

Dozens of jobs were posted on its website today, including positions for quality control analysts and manufacturing associates at both the Norwood campus and the Cambridge headquarters. The company is now hiring for 326 Norwood-based positions, as well as 214 in Cambridge and others across the globe.

The Norwood Board of Selectmen last night approved a tax incentive financing, or TIF, agreement with the town that will allow it to expand its campus. With this approval, the proposal can be presented at the Fall Town Meeting. It must then get backed by Moderna's board of directors and go forward with a state approval process.

Also today, Moderna released a new analysis on its website suggesting that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is highly effective against circulating variants of concern. Two of those were a vaccine effectiveness study conducted in partnership with Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC) and a separate recent publication by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Moderna opened its Norwood campus in July 2018. The site for years operated solely as a manufacturing facility. In April, the company signed a 12-year lease for the former Mercer building at One Investors Way that includes 236,566 square foot of office space, according to The Boston Business Journal. The future development site is proposed to be about 350,000 square feet.

Scott Nickerson, Moderna senior vice president of manufacturing for the United States as well as the Norwood site, said the company recently celebrated its 10th anniversary at last month's Board of Selectmen's meeting. It has been a pioneer in the biotech industry, specializing in the creation of vaccines and therapeutics that use messenger RNA, or mRNA. While most known internationally for the production of the COVID-19 vaccine, it also has worked on treatments for immunooncology, autoimmune and rare diseases.

The Norwood facility supports most U.S. manufacturing of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine, which the company promised this spring to ramp up by 50 percent over the next year or so, according to The Boston Business Journal.

Between March 2020 and March 2021, Moderna hired 670 new employees, almost all of whom are based in Norwood, according to a spokesperson. Moderna had about 1,800 employees in total as of June 30.