Bioinformatics Engineer Job Description Template

The bioinformatics engineer builds the software and pipelines that turn biological data into analyzable results, most often genomic sequence data. The role sits between software engineering and life science, and it requires enough biology to know when a result is implausible and enough engineering to process data at a scale that makes naive approaches unusable.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

• Build and maintain pipelines for processing sequencing and biological data
• Implement and validate analysis workflows for accuracy and reproducibility
• Optimize pipelines for compute cost and turnaround time
• Integrate reference data sources and manage their versioning
• Implement quality control checks across the analysis pipeline
• Support clinical validation of analysis methods where required
• Build tooling and interfaces for scientists to run analyzes
• Document pipeline behavior, versions and validation evidence
• Investigate anomalous results and trace them to their cause
• Work with scientists to translate methods into production pipelines

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in bioinformatics, computational biology, computer science or a related field

Required Skills and Experience

• 3+ years of bioinformatics or computational biology engineering
• Strong Python, and familiarity with R where relevant
• Experience with workflow systems such as Nextflow, Snakemake or WDL
• Understanding of sequencing data formats and common analysis tools
• Ability to work with large data volumes efficiently
• Sufficient biological knowledge to sanity check results
• Reproducibility discipline including containerisation and version pinning
• Cloud or high performance computing experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with clinical grade pipeline validation
• Knowledge of variant calling and annotation workflows