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SalaryAbout Us
The convergence of laboratory automation, high-throughput assays, and machine learning is moving the medium of biological discovery to silicon. At LatchBio, we are building a biological cloud to store, visualize and analyze data from biological experiments. Over fifty biotech companies are using our platform to accelerate their ability to engineer biology, from drug discovery to bioproduction.
About the role
We're looking for a Bioinformatics Engineer to work closely with our customers and facilitate the migration of their end-to-end bioinformatics infrastructure onto Latch.
As a Bioinformatics Engineer, you will spend most of the time understanding the customer's science and building bioinformatics software to serve their scientific needs.
Technical requirements
Ability to understand new types of biological assays quickly. Given an experiment unfamiliar to you, eg. CITE-seq, can you fill in the following after skimming a few papers:- What biological questions does this assay answer?
- Why are the results necessary to biologists? What steps are performed in the lab to carry out this assay? How can variation in each step skew our results?
- What alternative experiments give similar results, and what are the tradeoffs between options?
- Appreciation and understanding of the slow / tedious nature of the scientific process
Ability to write code to process data from unfamiliar biological assays, including the use of:- workflow orchestration frameworks to process unorganized and poorly documented data (eg. latch, nextflow, snakemake)
- visualization libraries to distill key biological insights from processed data into reports/notebooks interpretable by biologists
- statistical packages in R/python for more exploratory analysis of processed data
Some experience with basic software engineering and web development
You are a good fit for this role if :
You have strong statistics and linear algebra fundamentals to evaluate the technical trade-offs between tools. Your natural tendency when coming across a tool (e.g., bowtie alignment) is to understand the math behind it and how it works deeply. If you rely on these tools as black boxes and do not demonstrate a strong desire to understand their underlying principles, then this role may not be a suitable fit for you.
You are independent and like to have high ownership. You will be the primary contact for migrating a customer's end-to-end drug discovery / bioengineering campaign on Latch. As such, you should be comfortable scoping out customers’ needs and building the right technical solution.
You are not a good fit for this role if:
You only want to program and not interface with customers. Our Bioinformatics Engineer will serve as a customer success endpoint to enable constantly adapt changing science to Latch. As such, having genuine curiosity and excitement to work with customers is key.
You prefer specialization in a specific scientific domain instead of branching out and researching areas you may need to become more familiar with. Although current expertise in your field is a plus, you will be working with a diverse set of customers with scientific goals spanning from antibody discovery to strain optimization. Your day-to-day will require you to grasp new scientific concepts rapidly, and you won’t have time to go deep into your favorite scientific domain.
You lack intellectual curiosity. Our team enjoys the discovery and communication of new ideas. This is a core part of our culture. We hold a weekly systems and math reading group (would like to start more). We are looking for fellow scientists / engineers who are hungry to learn new things.
Our team could not be more serious about our opportunity to build a generational platform for science:
We work six days a week. Monday through Saturday.- We work strictly in person in Mission Bay, SF.
- We want hands-on engineers who want to build and ship things and have demonstrated an exceptional ability to do so.
