Bioinformatician

£50-60k salary + equity + benefits!

London

Hybrid working

This start-up are on a mission to revolutionise the world's food sources. Picture yourself at the forefront of a groundbreaking agbiotech startup, using cutting-edge computational methods to accelerate the development of more sustainable, nutritious, and climate-resilient crops. They're building the world's first ML-driven target discovery platform for crop gene-editing, and need your expertise to take it to the next level!

What sets them apart?

Inspired by advancements in drug discovery, their talented team harnesses the power of deep learning, transformers, and graph-based technologies to identify high-value genetic targets for crop gene-editing. Join them in making a global impact on plant sciences, food security, and the environment.

What are they looking for you to accomplish?

You'll be part of their small Bioinformatics Team, working hand-in-hand with the CTO and Principal Bioinformatician to identify and refine appropriate data inputs for knowledge graphs. Beyond this, you'll have the opportunity to support on data engineering and ML workflows, working cross-functionally to gain broad experience across computational biology activities.

This is the perfect opportunity for an ambitious biology (post)grad looking for an impactful, dynamic and multi-faceted engineering role in biotech. The position offers the chance to be at the forefront of a truly global and transformative mission, using state-of-the-art computational methods, within a fast-growing agbiotech startup. They are poised for significant growth. As we move towards future funding rounds we envision the role growing with the company, offering leadership opportunities as we scale. If you're passionate about bioinformatics, plant sciences, food security and impact, we'd love to hear from you!

Bioinformatician Responsibilities:

• Pipeline Development and Optimisation: Build, test and benchmark robust & scalable RNA-seq, scRNA-seq & GWAS processing pipelines capable of handling thousands of experiments with precision. This includes a full suite of services from pre-processing & quality control to advanced mapping techniques.
• Data Strategy & Systems Engineering: Design & implement sophisticated data models which can be seamlessly integrated into their ecosystem. This will involve collaborating with our Data Engineering team to ensure consistency between data processing pipelines & knowledge graph data assets in dagster.
• Model Evaluation & Analytics: Implement a suite of bioinformatics analytical tools to validate & support our genetic target predictions (e.g. phylogenetics, gene-set enrichment analysis, protein-protein interaction prediction). This will involve application of your domain expertise to:
  • Explore predictions directly
  • Generate supporting evidence / analyses to enhance explainability & actionability of our predictions for customers
  • Conduct rigorous benchmarking of our novel bioinformatics methods against conventional bioinformatics approaches

What's in It for you?

• Competitive salary and stock options.
• Benefits package tailored to your needs.
• Opportunity for leadership and career development from day one.
• Ownership of ambitious projects with real-world impact.
• A vibrant, flexible, and supportive work environment in central London.
• Access to conferences, events, and training resources.
• Connect with leaders in graph-ML, ag-tech, and life sciences.

Key skills required:

• MSc or PhD in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology or Systems Biology (Plant Biology experience is a bonus)
• 3 years coding experience in python
• Experience in bash-scripting & cloud environments
• Fast & eager learner capable of working closely with interdisciplinary team

Desirables:

• Practical experience working with gene regulatory network/metabolic network data
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (preferably PyTorch)
• A relevant publication record
• Contribution to open-source bioinformatics-based projects/relevant personal github projects demonstrating organised, concise & well-formatted code
• Experience with modern data pipelining tools such as Dagster, Nextflow, Snakemake etc.

Ready to be a part of something extraordinary? If you're passionate about bioinformatics, plant sciences, and making a real impact, we want to hear from you! Apply now to join our fast-growing team and shape the future of food!