Featured RNA-Seq Job – Senior Research Software Engineer

BioSS has an international reputation for methodological development in statistics, mathematical modelling and bioinformatics. We offer a stimulating working environment, with over 40 staff and students at four locations, collaborating on applications in plant science, animal health & welfare, ecology & environmental science, and human health and nutrition.

We are seeking a senior research software engineer with a strong background in cloud computing and high-performance scientific computing on a 12 month fixed term contract to undertake the porting of bioinformatics workflows to serverless cloud platforms.

Serverless computing is a novel, exciting cloud computing paradigm, which is increasingly attracting attention due to its lower costs and higher scalability. RNA-sequencing is a high-throughput, data-intensive technique that lies at the heart of modern quantitative biology. The successful applicant will focus on porting to serverless platforms some workflows for the analysis of RNA-sequencing data previously developed by BioSS scientists.

This work will take place as part of the Horizon 2020 project CloudButton – Serverless Data Analytics Platform (https://cloudbutton.eu/) which is due to conclude in March 2022. CloudButton is a dynamic consortium which includes a number of world leaders in the field of high-performance computing (among them IBM, Atos, RedHat) and several high-profile academic partners. The successful candidate will interact with such partners and be a key player in the implementation of the genomic use case for CloudButton. Work on the project is a guaranteed gateway to state-of-the-art knowledge in a thriving technological field that is likely to see great expansion in the near future.

BioSS offers a stimulating working environment located in the James Clerk Maxwell Building at the University of Edinburgh, King’s Buildings campus and extensive opportunities to develop collaborations with scientists in both the research institute and university sectors.

As well as a very strong background in programming languages and software engineering, applicants should have:

• Experience in cloud computing. Familiarity with serverless cloud computing will be considered a plus
• Experience with algorithmic and methodological development
• Experience of collaborations with scientists and/or teams of computer programmers
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.