Bioinformatics Scientist

Company Overview Boost Biomes is using powerful social networks among microbes to provide novel, sustainable solutions to feed people via applications in food and agriculture. Our technology differentiator is the development of a causal understanding of microbial interactions powerful enough to allow the rational construction of designer functional consortia. Our first products seek to reduce the enormous waste in agricultural products due to crop loss to fungal pests in the field and post-harvest. There is significant need for new biological, organic, safe biopesticides for crops; current chemical products have many challenges, including regulatory burden for growers and safety concerns of consumers. The company has a rich pipeline of additional products under development. Harnessing the power of microbiomes will be imperative to a sustainable future. Boost’s core technology is a proprietary discovery platform that uses high throughput sequencing, enrichment, and advanced informatics to identify microbial products with important commercial roles. This approach is faster and less expensive than traditional approaches and uniquely identifies consortia products which are often more effective than single-microbe products. Boost is uniquely positioned at the leading edge of a fast-expanding field looking to tap into the value offered by understanding and engineering microbiomes.

The Role We are looking for a bioinformatician to develop our pipeline infrastructure. With extensive DNA sequence data generated using a proprietary approach, the incumbent will manage our bioinformatic pipeline. A key output will be to automate the generation of interaction maps. We seek a bioinformatician to build out, automate, streamline, and maintain the pipeline. The incumbent will work closely with our data engineer, outsourced software engineers, and colleagues who generate the DNA sequence data in the lab. Future directions will include opportunities to develop and expand our data analysis approaches; optimize the experimental design for improved interaction mapping; and in the longer-term, develop a ML/AI prediction engine using our collected interactome database.

Required Skills • Deep understanding of microbiome data and NGS assays, including handling large datasets and analysis, and familiarity with the standard toolchains • Knowledge of microbiology, microbial ecology and/or host/microbial interactions and experience working with large genomics datasets. • Strong experience programming in R and Python, Snakemake is a plus. • Experience in establishing and maintaining a cloud-based computational pipeline, preferably through AWS and Git version control • Command of Unix environment and shell scripting • Familiarity operating Solvuu and Snakemake helpful; experience with rebuilding Snakemake pipelines in NextFlow desirable, as well as transfer from Solvuu to AWS. • Experience running advanced computational biology projects to extract actionable information from biological data. • Knowledge of project management and effective time management • Excellent communication skills required • Ph.D. or Masters in Bioinformatics, Biological Sciences (Ecology, Microbiology), Genetics, Genomics, Computer Science, Mathematics, or related field • Industry experience required