Associate Principle Informatician, Omics, Oncology Data Science Platforms

Do you have expertise in bioinformatics pipelines and data engineering workflows? Would you like to apply your knowledge to impact cancer research in a company that follows the science and turns ideas into life-changing medicines? Then AstraZeneca might be the one for you!

About AstraZeneca

At AstraZeneca, we put patients first and strive to meet their unmet needs worldwide. Working here

means being entrepreneurial, thinking big and working together to make the impossible a reality. If

you are swift to action, confident to lead, willing to collaborate, and curious about what science can

do, then you’re our kind of person.

Oncology Data Science Platforms                                                                        

The Oncology Data Science – Data, Analytics, and AI Platforms (ODSP) team comprises multiple groups across the Cambridge UK, Boston MA, Gaithersburg MD, Barcelona ESP, and Munich DE sites.  ODSP develops technology, software, and data infrastructure to advance our Oncology data science. Our vision is to evolve data science into a driver of innovation within Oncology. We do this by creating a strategic culture that values our data as a true business asset, organizing our data so that it’s accessible and easy to find, integrated, and re-usable for Humans & AI, and building the best computational tools to support scientific decision making.

What you’ll do

The ODSP team is growing to meet the strategic initiatives pursued by AZ Oncology for big data generation including DNA sequencing, single-cell and bulk expression, proteomics etc. We are looking for a talented and highly motivated Senior Bioinformatician with strong background in working with Next Generation Sequencing data to join our team. You will work on designing and applying innovative computational analysis methods with a focus on AZ’s exciting and rapidly growing Multi-omics research portfolio. 

Major Duties and Responsibilities

• Contribute to the development of an end-to-end data analysis capability as part of a cross-functional team.

• Manage, analyse, and deliver high throughput Multi-omics (Genomics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics, Epigenomics etc) data 
• Develop and Support testing and verification of data management analyses and tools and pipelines in collaboration with AZ stakeholders.

• Build new data extraction, transformation and loading processes.  

• Ensure accurate automation of data analysis.

• Build scalable (Cloud and HPC) solutions that work on tens of thousands of CPUs 

• Define and refine the data quality standards and validate the quality of the datasets using various tools to assess the correctness of the results  

• Assist with developing requirements for internal software development 

• Build and maintain high level of experience with team's software and IT technologies 

• Work collaboratively with scientists and outside collaborators to cultivate, process, and analyse genomic information 

• Develop and maintain an in depth understanding of the scientific and technological domains supported by the team 

• Build and steer further development of small prototype tools for bench scientists to access and visualize genomic data 

• Finally, you will collaborate with industry and academia, and exploit external resources, to find the most effective solutions to oncology data science problems 

Education, Qualifications, Skills, and Experience

Essential Requirements:

• Relevant graduate degree:
  • Bioinformatics / Computational biology

• Minimum 3 years of applied experience in bioinformatics data analysis.

• Experience in using and analysing Illumina NGS data.

• Ability to explore novel bioinformatic approaches to improve sensitivity and specificity of NGS based workflows.

• Strong, professional communication skills and excellent attention to detail, capable of developing good working relationships with diverse individuals. 
• Experience working within a team environment.
• Takes ownership of tasks and has a can-do attitude.
  • Proven programming skills, Python preferred.
  • Experience in software development standard methodologies
  • Experience in Unix
  • Experience working with Nextflow.
  • Cloud computing (preferably AWS), and High-Performance Computing (HPC)

Desirable:

• Proficiency analysing and interpreting data from multiple 'omic platfor