Bioinformatician

Company: Biographica Ltd

About the job

Biographica is on a mission to accelerate the development of more productive, sustainable, nutritious & climate-resilient food sources. To achieve this, we're building the world’s first ML-driven target discovery platform for crop gene-editing.

Target discovery for gene-editing
While gene-editing of crops is becoming ever more efficient, identifying which genes to edit and how remains a significant challenge. To overcome this bottleneck, we use cutting-edge deep learning to accurately and efficiently identify high value genetic targets for crop gene-editing. Our approach draws inspiration from advancements in the drug discovery space, incorporating transformers, graphs & causal-ML to build a best-in-class discovery platform for plant sciences.

Team
Led by co-founders Dom (CTO) and Cecy (CEO), we are now a team of 17. We primarily work together in person from our office in Spitalfields, London. We work 4 days per week in-person with fridays WFH. This role will be based in London, with close collaboration across ML, data and scientific product.

Requirements

• Extensive experience building and working with pangenomes in plants
• Extensive hands-on experience with nextflow and -omics pipelines
• Strong coding proficiency in python
• High familiarity with most common -omics file formats such as fastq, vcf, hal, gff
• Familiarity with Linux environment and common bioinformatics command line tools such as seqkit, bcftools, samtools to query files quickly and effectively
• Experience with different public omics data repositories, such as NCBI, ENSEMBL, JGI, Solgenomics etc
• Ability to communicate clearly across disciplines. You will work daily with ML engineers, data engineers, and plant scientists, and need to translate real scientific workflows into robust software
• Ability to understand requirements of cross-functional teams and the ability to synthesise complex information

The candidate

As part of the Computational Biology team, you will lead on the development of robust, scalable omics workflows that power our discovery platform, with an initial focus on plant pangenomes. You will review and evolve our existing pipelines, define how pangenomes should strengthen discovery projects, and build the computational foundations that connect public and internal omics data to downstream ML and target discovery. Working across data, ML and plant science, you will own pangenome creation and curation, drive innovation in workflows spanning gene expression and variant calling, and contribute to scientific software that is reproducible, efficient and production-ready.

Your first priorities will be to:

• Review our existing omics pipelines, focussing on pangenomes and RNA-seq to begin with
• Define and implement a strategy to improve our discovery projects using pangenomes

Core responsibilities

• Own pangenome creation and curation
• Own -omics pipeline maintenance & -omics curation quality
• Drive innovation in our -omics pipelines, including pangenomes, gene expression and variant calling feeding into our in-house data warehouses for downstream ML and discovery applications
• Work closely together with the data team to ensure seamless data onboarding and processing
• Support public data QC and onboarding for discovery projects

Additional responsibilities

• Support in-house discovery projects
• Help maintain and drive high standards in our scientific code base

Experience level: Senior

How to apply: send your CV and motivation to [email protected]