Senior Bioinformatics Engineer

Quadram Institute Bioscience (QIB) have an exciting opportunity for a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer to join the Core Bioinformatics team and define the bioinformatics support behind QIB’s research into gut health, microbiology and food. 

Background: 

The Quadram Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to understanding how food and microbes interact to promote health and prevent disease. Located in one of Europe’s largest centres of life sciences, QIB has close partnerships with the University of East Anglia, the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, the John Innes Centre, and The Earlham Institute. (https://quadram.ac.uk/). 

QIB’s Core Bioinformatics team maintains several platforms to facilitate the storage, analysis and publication of researcher’s data. IRIDA and OMERO instances archive sequence and microscopy data, respectively. Computationally intense analyses are completed on the on-site HPC cluster either directly through submitting Slurm jobs via the terminal, or interactively through the Galaxy instance or Cloudgene web service. Furthermore, QIB hosts a private OpenNebula Cloud instance allowing researchers to create customised virtual machines to complete their analysis. The Core Bioinformatics team also contribute to research projects directly by developing pipelines to analyse genomics and metagenomics datasets. 

The role: 

As part of Core Bioinformatics, the role will primarily consist of maintaining our infrastructure (in particular, the Galaxy Project server and OpenNebula Cloud). This aspect will require experience and familiarity with the Linux Command Line, including some aspects of server administration (ansible, systemd, etc.) and working knowledge of PostgreSQL or similar relational databases. The containerisation of software with Singularity or Docker is a key aspect of this role. 

The job holder will also provide support to research projects, analysing NGS datasets (usually microbial genomics) mostly using Nextflow pipelines (publicly available or bespoke). The ability to troubleshoot pipeline executions and improve existing pipelines is essential. Knowledge of microbiology and microbial genomics is desirable, but the candidate must be willing to learn more about microbiology and microbiome and make efforts to keep up to date with the latest relevant literature. 

The ideal candidate: 

You are an experienced bioinformatician or computational biologist with a thorough understanding of current bioinformatics workflows and platforms. You are capable of working independently and can clearly communicate complex issues that may require support from your colleagues to overcome. You have previously held roles that focus on supporting other colleague’s research and have been exposed to maintaining the backends of common bioinformatics platforms such as Galaxy. 

As a developer, you should be fluent in Python or R. Some experience with other languages (such as JavaScript, or Perl) will be a plus. Previous examples of creating and executing containerised code is essential. You are most comfortable when using Linux based systems and writing/running bash scripts in a terminal. 

Additional information: 

This post offers the successful candidate an exciting opportunity to apply and develop their knowledge and skills in the context of cutting-edge microbial genomics and microbiome research. There is a diverse selection of training opportunities on campus, and we encourage participation in relevant scientific conferences.

Salary on appointment will be within the range £44,500 to £55,000 per annum depending on qualifications and experience. This is a full-time post offered on an indefinite basis. 

For further information and details of how to apply, please visit our website https://jobs.quadram.ac.uk (via the 'Apply' button above) or contact the Human Resources team on 01603 450814 or nbi.recruitment@nbi.ac.uk quoting reference 1004878. This role meets the criteria for a visa application, and we encourage all qualified candidates to apply.  Please contact the Human Resources Team if you have any questions regarding your application or visa options. 

Interviews will be held on 9 June 2025. 

We are committed to equal opportunities and welcome applications from all sectors of society.  The Institute supports equality of opportunity within the workplace and expects all employees to share and display these values.  To support our commitment, we have a range of family, faith and diversity friendly working arrangements to help all staff achieve excellence in their area of work. 

As a Disability Confident employer, we guarantee to offer an interview to all disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for this vacancy. 

The closing date for applications will be 19 May 2025 

The Quadram Institute Bioscience is a registered charity (No. 1058499) and is an Equal Opportunities Employer.