Staff Scientist or Research Consultant in Bioinformatics and Genomic Reference Catalogue Development at Globe Institute

About the role

We are looking for a highly motivated informatician to join our team and play a central role in developing large-scale genomic reference catalogues for environmental and ancient DNA research.

Responsibilities

• Systematically identify and acquire genomes and other relevant FASTA resources from public repositories and scientific initiatives.
• Build, curate, document, version, and continuously expand large-scale genomic reference catalogues.
• Develop automated and reproducible workflows for resource discovery, download, processing, quality control, and catalogue construction.
• Assess sequence and assembly quality and identify contamination, redundancy, taxonomic inconsistencies, and other potential problems.
• Curate, adapt, and develop small bioinformatic programs where existing tools are insufficient.
• Process very large sequence collections using high-performance computing systems.
• Collaborate with researchers to ensure that the catalogues meet the scientific needs of environmental DNA, ancient DNA, metagenomic, and biodiversity research.
• Contribute to software development, computational analyses, workflows, and other activities within the informatics group.

Requirements

• Master's degree or PhD in bioinformatics, computer science, computational biology, genomics, data science, or a related field.
• Strong programming skills in Python and Unix shell scripting.
• Experience working with genomic sequence data and FASTA-based resources.
• Experience developing automated and reproducible computational workflows.
• Familiarity with version control systems such as Git.
• Experience with HPC environments and queue-management systems such as Slurm.
• Ability to work independently and effectively in interdisciplinary teams.
• Strong written and spoken English.

Qualifications

• An analytical and systematic mindset.
• A curiosity and a strong ability to troubleshoot complex technical and scientific problems.
• An excellent attention to detail and strong organizational skills.
• The ability to take long-term ownership of a large computational resource.
• A strong collaborator who thrives in an interdisciplinary environment.
• The ability to adapt to new challenges, data sources, and technologies.

Skills

• Experience working with public genomic repositories and large-scale sequence resources.
• Experience with genome assembly assessment, contamination detection, or sequence-quality control.
• Knowledge of taxonomy, taxonomic classification, or the curation of taxonomic reference resources.
• Experience with metagenomic, environmental DNA, or ancient DNA data.
• Experience developing workflows using tools such as Snakemake or Nextflow.
• Knowledge of low-level programming languages such as C, C++, or Rust.
• Experience processing and organizing very large biological datasets.
• Experience developing and maintaining scientific software.