Bioinformatics Engineer

About Arc Institute

The Arc Institute is a new scientific institution conducting curiosity-driven basic science and technology development to understand and treat complex human diseases. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Arc is an independent research organization founded on the belief that many important research programs will be enabled by new institutional models. Arc operates in partnership with Stanford University, UCSF, and UC Berkeley.

While the prevailing university research model has yielded many tremendous successes, we believe in the importance of institutional experimentation as a way to make progress. These include:

• Funding: Arc fully funds Core Investigators’ (PIs’) research groups, liberating scientists from the typical constraints of project-based external grants.
• Technology: Biomedical research has become increasingly dependent on complex tooling. Arc Technology Centers develop, optimize, and deploy rapidly advancing experimental and computational technologies in collaboration with Core Investigators. 
• Support: Arc aims to provide first-class support—operationally, financially, and scientifically—that will enable scientists to pursue long-term high risk, high reward research that can meaningfully advance progress in disease cures, including neurodegeneration, cancer, and immune dysfunction.
• Culture: We believe that culture matters enormously in science and that excellence is difficult to sustain. We aim to create a culture that is focused on scientific curiosity, a deep commitment to truth, broad ambition, and selfless collaboration.

Arc has scaled to over 350 people to date. With $650M+ in committed funding and a state of the art new lab facility in Palo Alto, Arc will continue to grow quickly in the coming years.

About the position

The Arc Institute is seeking a Bioinformatics Engineer to join the Bioinformatics team within the Computational Technology Center. The successful candidate will play a crucial role in advancing the Arc’s Virtual Cell Initiative, which aims to create the machine learning models that make accurate predictions of cellular states and their responses to perturbations, and ultimately to help identify rational therapeutic targets for complex human diseases.\

About you

• You are passionate about science and excited about answering biological questions related to complex human diseases.
• You possess outstanding scientific coding and software engineering skills.
• You are detail oriented and enjoy deep and meticulous analyses of complex datasets.
• Your organizational skills enable you to manage multiple concurrent projects, and your curiosity and creativity drive you to continuous learning and innovation.

In this position, you will

• Implement, test, and maintain state-of-the-art analysis pipelines for various high-throughput projects using best software engineering practices.
• Run the production pipeline for large-scale production datasets and provide quality assurance to experimentalists and technologists.
• Process sequencing data as they come off instruments, monitoring runs, producing actionable results and  troubleshooting issues to ensure timely delivery of results.
• Support multiple concurrent projects across different Technology Centers, requiring effective context-switching between different experimental approaches.
• Partner with experimentalists to troubleshoot analyses and help interpret pipeline outputs.
• Manage code repositories on GitHub, document workflows, and maintain computational environments to ensure pipeline reliability.
• Rapidly learn novel wet-lab technologies, benchmark and master emerging computational methodologies.
• Assist others in utilizing software packages and pipelines.

Requirements

• Bachelor or Master degree in  Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Science, or related quantitative fields.
• 2-5 years of experience analyzing high-throughput sequencing datasets, especially single-cell omics data.
• Strong software engineering skills, including testing, documentation, and version control.
• High competency with Python, git/GitHub, and Linux.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to effectively collaborate with wet-lab scientists.
• Strong statistical, mathematical, analytical, and data science skills.

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with cloud computing.
• Familiarity with CRISPR screens technology and analyses.

The base salary range for this position is $122,500 to $152,500. These amounts reflect the range of base salary that the Institute reasonably would expect to pay a new hire or internal candidate for this position. The actual base compensation paid to any individual for this position may vary depending on factors such as experience, market conditions, education/training, skill level, and whether the compensation is internally equitable, and does not include bonuses, commissions, differential pay, other forms of compensation, or benefits. This position is also eligible to receive an annual discretionary bonus, with the amount dependent on individual and institute performance factors.