Bioinformatics Support Engineer - Pathogen Informatics

Salary in the region of £36,737 - £44,451 (dependent on experience) plus excellent benefits

Permanent/ Open Contract

We are looking to recruit an enthusiastic Bioinformatics Support Engineer for the Pathogen Informatics team, which provides informatics support to members of the Parasites and Microbes programme.

You will be an excellent communicator and problem solver with a strong interest in biological data, and passionate about providing a high level of customer service. You will work within a team of seven software developers and bioinformaticians, and will act as frontline support for requests from members of the programme. You will be responsible for monitoring the helpdesk and responding to submitted user issues, managing and performing software installations, ensuring smooth running of data through automated analysis pipelines, performing submissions and updates to public data repositories, and where appropriate assigning requests and bug reports to other members of the team.

The team is based on the principles of agile development and strongly promotes open source software development using GitHub for all software projects. This is an excellent opportunity for you to work in a dynamic software development and support team with opportunities to gain significant experience in areas such as genome sequencing, advanced UNIX, Python and bash scripting, software version control, software development practices, and bioinformatics analysis. Moreover, it is an exciting opportunity to support world-leading research groups in understanding infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia, and thus contribute to improving global health.

Essential Skills
MSc in Bioinformatics or a related discipline
Solid understanding of genomics
Confident usage of the UNIX command line
Demonstrable experience in at least one modern programming/scripting language
Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills
Ability to manage the own workload effectively in a proactive manner
Strong interpersonal and communication skills
The ability to explain technical issues effectively and in an understandable manner to non­technical users
Attention to detail

Ideal Skills
Experience with providing frontline technical support within a scientific environment
Experience with submitting data to public repositories
Experience with software package management systems and installation processes
Experience with running software on a compute cluster
Knowledge of new sequencing technology data
Working experience in an agile team