(Senior) Scientist, Bioinformatics

Full-time - Entry Level

Seattle, WA

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

About the position

We are looking for a bioinformatician with expertise developing and running computational pipelines to study human genomic and transcriptomic data with a focus on immune-related genes. The ideal candidate should have a strong foundation in method development and an interest in researching, developing, testing and adapting cutting-edge methods for sequence data analysis. The candidate we are seeking will have experience analyzing large-scale whole-genome and transcriptome data sets and ideally some hands-on experience with AWS. The candidate will be part of a team of computational biologists with expertise spanning bioinformatics, statistical genetics, population genomics, and functional genomics. We encourage candidates who are passionate about increasing the inclusion of underrepresented populations in genomic research to apply, as this is a core mission of Variant Bio. It is strongly preferred that this role is based in Seattle, WA and in the office a minimum of 3 days a week.

Responsibilities

• Research, test, develop and run bioinformatics methods to analyze genomic and transcriptomic sequencing data, with a focus on genotyping highly similar alleles in immune-related loci.
• Develop benchmarking methods for genotyping of highly difficult and complex regions in the human genome using short-read and long-read sequencing data.
• Process and analyze whole genome sequencing data from diverse populations, including variant calling, imputation, and extensive quality control.
• Process and analyze bulk and single-cell transcriptomic data, including expression quantification, TCR/BCR profiling, and differential expression analysis.
• Run, maintain, and add to bioinformatics methods and workflows for analysis of large-scale data using AWS cloud compute.
• Work with software engineers and cloud architects to automate workflows and build robust infrastructure.
• Disseminate results internally and externally and contribute to presentations and publications.

Requirements

• Ph.D. degree with 2+ years, Masters degree with 6+ years, or Bachelors degree with 8+ years of relevant work experience in bioinformatics, computational biology, statistics, computer science, or a related field. Experience in immunology is a plus.
• Experience processing large-scale WGS data using standard bioinformatics software packages, such as FASTQC, GATK, samtools, bedtools, bcftools, etc. Experience working with RNA-seq data and relevant software packages is a plus.
• Strong programming skills and experience with high performance computing; proficiency in bash, Python, R; experience programming in Java/C++ preferred.
• Software development experience using e.g. git and Docker.
• Experience with cloud-based computing on AWS; experience with Nextflow on AWS Batch a plus.
• Familiarity programmatically interfacing with relational databases such as MySQL a plus.
• Good working knowledge of public human genomic resources, such as the 1000 Genomes Project, the Human Genome Diversity Project, gnomAD, the UK Biobank and other biobanks.
• Publication record in the field of genomics a plus.
• Independent, creative, detail-oriented, and a critical thinker.

Benefits

• Opportunity to be part of a well funded and highly innovative biotech.
• Competitive, industry leading salary, and comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, vision, short and long term disability and life insurance.
• 401(k) plan through Fidelity that includes up to 3% employer match and flexible investment options.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Choice of public transportation (Orca Card) provided by the company or subsidized parking.
• Centrally located Eastlake, Seattle location in a new Alexandria building with modern facilities.