Bioinformatics Specialist

Essential Duties

• Perform bioinformatics analysis of next-generation and other high-throughput sequencing data.
• Support genome sequencing, assembly, annotation, microbial genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, phylogenetics, and related analyses.
• Conduct statistical analyses and scientific data-quality reviews.
• Process and analyze complex genomic and other biological datasets.
• Develop, execute, modify, test, document, and maintain reproducible bioinformatics workflows using Nextflow and related workflow-management technologies.
• Create scientific scripts and analytical tools using Python, R, Perl, Java, BioPerl, or similar languages.
• Optimize pipelines for computational efficiency, storage utilization, scalability, and reproducibility.
• Support adaptation of bioinformatics workflows and algorithms to HPC and cloud-computing environments.
• Support implementation, configuration, testing, and validation of open-source, commercial, and custom bioinformatics software.
• Aid in the creation and maintenance of containerized bioinformatics applications and scientific-computing environments.
• Maintain and update reference datasets, databases, software environments, and analytical resources.
• Troubleshoot workflow failures, software dependencies, data-format compatibility issues, analytical errors, and computational-resource problems.
• Participate in software testing, quality-control, validation, and user-acceptance activities.
• Document analytical methods, workflows, software configurations, results, and technical procedures.
• Contribute to technical reports, scientific presentations, manuscripts, methods documentation, and other program products as needed.
• Provide bioinformatics technical consultation and user support appropriate to level of experience.
• Assist scientists and technical users in understanding bioinformatics tools, analyses, workflows, and results.
• Collaborate with bioinformaticians, scientists, system administrators, DevOps personnel, infrastructure teams, data-management personnel, and other technical staff.
• Participate in technical training, knowledge-sharing, and continuous professional development.
• Lead complex analytical assignments and mentor less-experienced bioinformatics personnel at senior levels.

Requirements

• Demonstrated education, training, or professional experience related to bioinformatics, computational biology, genomics, biological sciences, computer science, data science, or a closely related field.
• Knowledge of bioinformatics methods and genomic or sequencing-data analysis.
• Experience or demonstrated proficiency with scientific scripting or statistical programming.
• Ability to work with large and complex scientific datasets.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively within multidisciplinary scientific and technical teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting public-health, infectious-disease, laboratory-science, HHS, CDC, or other federal scientific programs.
• Experience with Python, R, Perl, Java, BioPerl, Linux, high-performance computing (HPC), cloud-computing environments, bioinformatics workflows & development, Nextflow, nf-core/ph-core, or similar workflow standards, bioinformatics workflow optimization, containers/Singularity, or similar technologies, scientific software testing and validation, genomics & sequence analysis, next-generation sequencing (NGS) and high-throughput sequencing, genome assembly, functional annotation, microbial genomics, metagenomics, phylogenetic analysis, data analysis & public health, statistical analysis, epidemiologic or public-health data.