Senior Bioinformatician

Do you want to help us improve human health and understand life on Earth? Make your mark by shaping the future to enable or deliver life-changing science to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

About the Role:

We are seeking a Senior Bioinformatician to join the Human Genetics Informatics (HGI) team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. HGI is the development team responsible for providing efficient access to cutting-edge analysis methods for Human Genetics faculty groups at the Sanger Institute. The position is fixed term for 2 years.

You will be responsible for:
This role will involve working as part of the HGI team to deliver and optimise biological pipelines producing data for further analysis by human genetics faculty research groups. Key post holder responsibilities will be

• Working with on-premise and cloud-based spark clusters to run Hail, a distributed Python library developed at the Broad institute (https://www.hail.is). You will be expected to use Hail to analyse variant data from very large cohorts, and produce summaries and visualisations to aid the Sanger institute scientists in their research. Examples of existing hail code are here: https://github.com/wtsi-hgi/exomeQC-hail-gnomad
• Developing, running and maintaining bioinformatic pipelines (especially variant calling, RNASeq and scRNASeq pipelines). Examples of existing pipelines are here: https://github.com/wtsi-hgi/nextflow_ci/tree/rna_seq

About You:

As part of the HGI team,  you will have access to Sanger's world-class computational resources, including an OpenStack private cloud environment, a 15000+ core computational cluster and many petabytes of high-speed distributed file systems and object stores. You will be expected to work both independently and closely with colleagues to develop, debug, and optimize their code; and to be comfortable communicating directly with scientific researchers regarding analysis requirements. Recent graduates or current students in their final year are also encouraged to apply, although it is strongly desirable that any candidate has substantial development experience outside of coursework (e.g. work experience, participation in open source projects or the pursuit of personal coding projects).

Essential Skills:

• Experience in the management and analysis of large genetic data sets
• Experience in bioinformatics analysis with data processing pipelines
• Demonstrable experience coding python
• Experience of high-performance computing and environments (e.g. LSF or Slurm)
• Knowledge of core computer science concepts and practices
• Capable of quickly learning and using the most suitable programming language for the job, including both interpreted and compiled languages
• Experience with Git and GitHub
• Knowledge of Linux based operating systems, libraries, and tools
• Excellent communication and presentation skills
• Motivation and attention to detail

Desirable Skills:

• Familiarity with one or more existing genomic variant callers (e.g. GATK)
• Experience with large-scale genomic data analysis tools (e.g. Hail)
• Understanding of web APIs to retrieve datasets from various web resources
• Knowledge of virtualization/containerisation technologies (Docker, Singularity)
• Knowledge (or experience) of Cloud environments (OpenStack, GCP, AWS)
• Familiarity with Cloud technologies (e.g. Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, GitHub CI)
• Experience with relational and non-relational databases

For any position related questions please contact Vivek Iyer (vvi@sanger.ac.uk)

Other Information:

Salary per annum: £43,597-£51,794 - dependent upon skills and experience.

Application Process:

Please apply with your CV (ideally 2-3 pages at most) and a cover letter outlining:

• Why you would like to work at Sanger
• Your specific qualities and skills relevant to this role

Closing Date: 26th October 2023

Working at Wellcome Sanger:

Our flexible-hybrid working environment is designed to support a healthy work-life balance. This means you can work flexibly with a combination of working from home, and working from our Campus to allow you to focus on being productive and part of the team while enjoying the benefits of working flexibly.

We aim to attract, recruit, retain and develop talent from the widest possible talent pool, thereby gaining insight and access to different markets to generate a greater impact on the world. We have a supportive culture with the following staff networks, LGBTQ+, Parents and Carers and Race Equity to bring people together to share experiences, offer specific support and development opportunities and raise awareness. The networks are also a place for allies to provide support to others.

We want our people to be whoever they want to be because we believe people who bring their best selves to work, do their best work. That’s why we’re committed to creating a truly inclusive culture at Sanger Institute. We will consider all individuals without discrimination and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees, where everyone can thrive.

Our Benefits:

We are proud to deliver an awarding campus-wide employee wellbeing strategy and programme. The importance of good health and adopting a healthier lifestyle and the commitment to reduce work-related stress is strongly acknowledged and recognised at Sanger Institute.