Bioinformatics Scientist

Job Purpose:  Use common bioinformatics and data science methods to analyze and communicate Trace Genomics data. Design and implement improvements to the Trace Genomics bioinformatics pipeline.  Use data from our metagenomics pipeline to advance the scientific understanding and application of soil biology.  Work with a team to apply bioinformatics methods to soil metagenomes, help design and analyze experiments to understand the soil microbiome, and relate findings to the data in our metagenomics database.  Develop methods to ensure data compatibility across lab and pipeline improvements.  Ensure reference databases are up to date, accurate and efficient. Serve as a lead resource to communicate bioinformatics-related information to teams across the company.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Develop and test bioinformatics methods (proportional to bioinformatics experience)
• Contribute to bioinformatics infrastructure (proportional to programming experience)
• Curate and maintain taxonomic and functional gene databases
• Develop algorithms and applications for inferring biological knowledge from metagenomic data
• Keep up to date with the latest developments in algorithms for analysis of metagenomics data and its applications in the field of agriculture/soil sciences
• Perform custom analytics to investigate pipeline performance, develop new data products, or satisfy customer requests
• Provide cross-functional assistance with soil science and WGS teams in experimental designs and data analysis
• Collaborate with scientists and agronomists to develop new high-quality data products that solve agricultural problems
• Train and inform team members on the proper application and interpretation of metagenomic data
• Be the voice of expertise for metagenomic and bioinformatic tools at Trace Genomics 

Qualifications

• Ph.D. or equivalent experience in microbiology or bioinformatics
• Expertise in the analysis and interpretation of metagenome data
• Working knowledge of Python (preferred) or R to read code, write functions, create plots
• Experience packaging and documenting code for re-use by other team members or for deployment in production
• Experience creating custom reference datasets from large publicly available resources (NCBI, uniprot, etc)
• Strong skills in statistical reasoning and data visualization
• Ability to communicate science to experts and non-experts
• Ability to collaborate with others effectively
• 2+ years work experience in non-academic research preferred
• Expertise in bioinformatics, specifically microbial genomics or metagenomics preferred
• Experience using tools for data analysis in Python (e.g. numpy, pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn) or R
• Familiarity with cloud computing services like AWS (preferred) or equivalent
• Some/basic knowledge of relational databases

Please note, there is no relocation allowance or visa sponsorship available for this position.  Watch out for phishing; we are not using a 3rd party to source this role.