Senior Bioinformatics Scientist, Algorithm Development

Company Description

Guardant Health is a leading precision oncology company focused on helping conquer cancer globally through use of its proprietary blood tests, vast data sets and advanced analytics. The Guardant Health Oncology Platform leverages capabilities to drive commercial adoption, improve patient clinical outcomes and lower healthcare costs across all stages of the cancer care continuum. Guardant Health has launched liquid biopsy-based Guardant360®, Guardant360 CDx and GuardantOMNI® tests for advanced stage cancer patients. These tests fuel development of its LUNAR program, which aims to address the needs of early stage cancer patients with neoadjuvant and adjuvant treatment selection, cancer survivors with surveillance, asymptomatic individuals eligible for cancer screening and individuals at a higher risk for developing cancer with early detection. 

Job Description

As a senior member of the Bioinformatics Algorithms group, you will combine your knowledge of bioinformatics, experimental design, data analysis, and software development to implement novel next-generation sequencing (NGS) algorithms, using custom assays and work closely with molecular biologists across multiple projects. You will apply cutting-edge methods in next-generation sequencing to develop blood-based, non-invasive approaches to identify biomarkers of cancer diagnosis and detection. You are responsible for the analysis and interpretation of biological data, as well as the design and implementation of new algorithms. Your analytical efforts enable the culture of data-driven development which is one of the keys to Guardant’s success. Guardant Health uses agile design and implementation practices coupled with the extensive validation and documentation required in a clinical environment. The company thrives by combining the best ideas and practices from molecular biology, bioinformatics, genomics, and clinical testing to improve healthcare for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Develop or improve algorithms for cancer detection and diagnosis.
• Analyze large volumes of NGS data in order to draw conclusions from a rich database of historical test results
• Formulate and conduct experimental data analysis, statistical modeling or in-silico simulations, and data visualization
• Design and execute bioinformatics analysis plans to generate insights from experimental data for improving algorithms and bioinformatics pipelines
• Write experimental protocols and engineering reports in collaboration with assay development scientists
• Precisely communicate analysis results to stakeholders across computational and experimental teams and proactively advocate for solutions based on the data insight
• Mentor junior bioinformatics staff on the team

Qualifications

• PhD in Bioinformatics, Statistics, Computational biology, Genomics, or related quantitative fields
• 4+ years of relevant experience in Pharmaceutical or Biotech industry
• Demonstrated experience in developing methods for analysis of experimental data in genomics and next-generation sequencing, under the context of product development
• Proficiency with a high-level scripting language Python/R, C++ is a plus
• Strong knowledge of statistics and computational biology algorithms for genomic analysis and cancer genomics (including statistical methods employed in analytical validation, variant calling)
• Experienced in the visualization of complex experiments to derive biological insights  
• Good understanding of library preparation methods used to generate next-generation sequencing data, including whole-genome, methylation and targeted sequencing
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills to foster highly collaborative environment, working with both experimental and computational scientists

Advantage if you have

• Experience in oncology NGS applications
• Startup experience in a newly formed company a plus

Additional Information

Hybrid Work Model: At Guardant Health, we have defined days for in-person/onsite collaboration and work-from-home days for individual-focused time. All U.S. employees who live within 50 miles of a Guardant facility will be required to be onsite on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. We have found aligning our scheduled in-office days allows our teams to do the best work and creates the focused thinking time our innovative work requires. At Guardant, our work model has created flexibility for better work-life balance while keeping teams connected to advance our science for our patients.

Covid Vaccination Policy:  Starting January 7, 2022, Guardant Health will require all employees to be fully vaccinated to either (a) establish that they ha