Microbiome Data Scientist

Who You Are 

Data drives you to achieve, mission drives you to excel, and the microbiome is something you’re deeply passionate about. In your current role, you are immersed in analytical work and work eloquently with large data sets. You are capable of designing and executing both detailed and open-ended analysis plans in a fast-paced environment, such as a startup undergoing hyper-growth. Teachers and mentors would describe you as a driven, focused, and analytical mind who grasps concepts quickly, engages with your subject, and, above all else, consistently delivers impeccable work using large data sets. You conduct the type of work that drives forward innovation and you effectively collaborate with a highly intellectual, diverse team containing individuals spanning from basic science experience to clinical trial execution.

You value time above all else, and if it was unlimited, you would spend most of it acquiring more knowledge (and datasets!) or simply “nerding out.” Importantly, you respect deadlines, starting on time and finishing on time. In conversation, you’re quick on your feet, employ an impressive vocabulary, and rarely fumble for words. You hold yourself and colleagues accountable to deliverables, work fast, and loathe stagnancy and procrastination. You have a proven track record in an R&D or clinical analysis team to leverage microbiome bioinformatic techniques to execute data-driven analyses of human cohort and/or clinical trial data. You are adept at organizing, accumulating, and harmonizing between datasets acquired from various unrelated sources, merging them into a larger, cohesive whole. Meta-analysis (across studies, study centers, geographies, and batches) fuels your passion for making sense of big data. As Seed’s early-phase discovery pipelines span numerous facets of human and planetary health, you’ll dive deep into identifying the application of microbes on host health and either already exhibit – or are well on your way to gaining – a mastery of many disciplines within microbiome science. Overall, you will help Seed remain a data-driven culture which reflects the intentionality of our brand and the human-centric ethos of our company.

You can rapidly internalize and become proficient in using our current R&D infrastructure to run bioinformatics analysis and discovery, both internally and using cloud resources. You obsess over data, insights, new trends, technologies and the kind of gut instincts that come from experience and deep knowledge of our brand. You are discerning about your analytical experiments. Projects under your scope will proceed quickly across many different dimensions – you are comfortable independently organizing, logging, and communicating your thoughts and processes. You love to speak up, think critically, and explain the complexity of bioinformatics to people at all levels of mastery.

What You’ll Do

• Deploy and use internal bioinformatic processing pipelines for the integration and analysis of human clinical and microbiome (metagenomic) data, including short read sequencing data
• Identify, curate, and analyze public and internal large-scale datasets to enable target identification and validation for Seed pre-clinical programs
• Perform exploratory and/or confirmatory meta-analyses using microbiome and 'omics data mining techniques across independently acquired data sources
• Explore and/or develop new tools facilitating dataset discovery, download, and connection, including metadata curation across datasets with distinct sets of variables, names, units, and definitions
• Keep up to date on the latest tools within the bioinformatics and microbiome literature (including batch correction and data aggregation methods) and identify approaches for us to test and benchmark internally 

• Participate in manuscript drafting with the potential to lead manuscripts as appropriate
• Produce data-driven insights (diversity, taxonomy, targeted hypotheses) for our lead preclinical and clinical programs using quantitative and qualitative approaches
• Supplement, guide, and contribute to discovery and analysis efforts across all bioinformatic sectors as needed

• PhD / MA + 2 years industry experience or BA + 4 yrs industry experience in microbiome science, informatics, or  related discipline
• Experience in analysis of multi-omics datasets and associated multivariate statistics 
• Knowledge of bioinformatics workflows in a Unix/Linux environment
• Ability to work in dynamic and fast-paced environments with tight deadlines

• Experience working with microbiome 16S and shotgun short-read datasets
• Experience with microbiome pipelines such as QIIME, Mothur, Biobakery, SHOGUN, etc
• Experience with machine learning and clinical trial analysis 
• Subject matter expertise in one or more areas of the human microbiome (gut, skin, vaginal, oral, etc)