Bioinformatics Engineer

We are hiring a Bioinformatics Engineer to create tools, infrastructure, and digital workflows to enable our scientists to learn from data ranging from epigenetic profiles to plant/soil metagenomics to crop microplot phenotypes. As part of the Data Science team, the Bioinformatics Engineer will work closely with scientists across Research to introduce powerful information technologies to accelerate our epigenetic trait development and agronomic active ingredient discovery platforms. This is an exciting opportunity to create a positive economic and environmental impact on agriculture by building out advanced bioinformatics technology.

The Bioinformatics Engineer joins the organization as a hands-on developer, partnering with the Data Team to create and deploy the architecture required to store, access, manage, analyze and interpret petabytes of data from the 100s of thousands of samples in our pipelines. We currently work across AWS services (S3, Nextflow, docker images), on-site data generation (Oxford Nanopore), SaaS LIMS, and ML models running on custom high-performance computing, with increasing levels of automation and abstraction. This role will help build the next steps.

The Bioinformatics Engineer reports to the Director, Data Science. Our aim is to unleash the power of plants to create a more agile and resilient food system. Come join us! This role is a hybrid onsite position based in our Emeryville, CA headquarters. 

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate across Research teams to create clean data architecture and tools to enable effective inquiry, ML model building, and visualization 

• Design, develop, enhance, maintain, and manage data infrastructure including cloud compute services, knowledge discovery platforms, and advanced experimental automation. 
• Champion our in-house software development practice, including tools, workflows, infrastructure, lifecycle management, and how to be an excellent collaborator

• Rapidly prototype data capabilities for research teams to maximize economic and environmental benefits for growers
• Productionize and publish valuable data science workflows
• Work to reduce work, by systematically improving the quality and maintainability of Sound’s field data and data processes

Targeted Skills & Experience

• Demonstrated software development success. Deep fluency with python and at least one other scripting language

• Familiarity with the data needs of biotech, including automation for molecular biology, genomic data collection and analysis, workflow design, and programmatic LIMS interaction

• Experience with statistics and visualization packages and data service providers
• Experience with data lake and warehouse principles, tools, and techniques
• Expertise with using cloud services to create data environments which operate according to FAIR principles
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work with experts at varying levels 

The successful Data Engineer embodies our core values of

• Boldness, by rapidly learning and adopting best-in-class tools, methods, and practice in software development and data stewardship
• Ownership, by working closely with interdisciplinary teams to deliver meaningful data-driven scientific outcomes
• Respect, by serving as an excellent collaborator across Sound to understand business needs, risks, and opportunities to help us work together better  
• Creativity, by exploring technical and process innovations broadly, even outside our sector, to find and implement the best solutions