Staff Bioinformatics Scientist

Company Description

Guardant Health is a leading precision oncology company focused on guarding wellness and giving every person more time free from cancer. Founded in 2012, Guardant is transforming patient care and accelerating new cancer therapies by providing critical insights into what drives disease through its advanced blood and tissue tests, real-world data and AI analytics. Guardant tests help improve outcomes across all stages of care, including screening to find cancer early, monitoring for recurrence in early-stage cancer, and treatment selection for patients with advanced cancer. For more information, visit guardanthealth.com and follow the company on LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and Facebook.

Job Description

The position is in the bioinformatics group and will work on the development of computational models for both the screening products (Shield™) and the oncology products (e.g., Guardant360®). The major responsibilities are to

• Develop, prototype, and analyze performance of novel statistical/machine learning models to further improve early cancer detection, minimal residual disease detection, longitudinal monitoring of treatment response, and cancer-signal-origin prediction

• Work closely with other teams to develop new technologies, both through hands-on work and providing ideas to team members

• Identify relevant external genomic, epigenomic and proteomic data sources and integrate with internal data to improve product performance and suggest new product features

• Participate in brainstorming sessions, maintain a highly productive and motivating work environment

• Work cross functionally with other teams to provide insight and feedback on projects

• Provide written documentation and specifications for transparency and reproducibility

• The preferred location for this position is either Palo Alto or San Diego.

Qualifications

• Dedicated to make a difference in a rapid-paced, collaborative startup-like environment

• Ph.D. in computational biology/bioinformatics, genomics, machine learning, or related field and a minimum of 8+ years related experience

• Experienced with statistical models for genomic/epigenomic data

• Proficiency with a high-level scripting language (Python/R; Python preferred)

• Experienced in visualization of complex experiments to derive biological insights

• Proficiency creating interactive tools and dashboards (streamlit, CLI tools, etc.)

• Proficiency creating and maintaining large data lakes and automated processing of constantly incoming data

Preferred

• Cancer biology and/or epigenetics background

• Experience in analyzing public genomic/epigenomic datasets (e.g. TCGA, ENCODE)

• Proficiency with Linux command-line and version control tools (git and GitHub)

• Ability to build reproducible and well written code (or packages) for data analysis

• Familiar with high-performance computing infrastructures (e.g., SGE, AWS, Spark)

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.

For positions based in Palo Alto, CA or Redwood City, CA, the ba