Senior Computational Biologist

Company: Nautilus Bio
Location: Seattle
Posted on: February 22, 2021

Job Description:

You will be making impactful changes to an early-stage algorithmic approach fundamental to a technology expected to become ubiquitous. Like testing and tweaking BLAST or read-alignment software in the early days of the genomics explosion. To be successful you will have the ability to guide work on challenging scientific problems in a multi-disciplinary team environment. Experience implementing novel approaches in production software working with an experienced, professional software team. Once our technology is out in the wild, everyone will want access to the architects of that technology, providing extensive opportunities for collaboration across academia and industry. Development of our core algorithm is guided by performance benchmarking on real and simulated data (to forecast future performance and what-if scenarios). To support this process, the role may include: Responsibilities

• Development of a reproducible performance benchmarking framework to track current and predicted quantitative accuracy, sensitivity, and precision.
• Expansion of data simulation framework to model more complex biophysical phenomena where appropriate, as guided by fresh experimental data, literature review, and discussions with enthusiastic colleagues. As our technology platform develops, we expect to make fundamental changes to our core algorithmic approach. These changes will be implemented in our production C++ code-base to improve:
  • Accuracy through more sophisticated modeling of biophysical phenomena and machine learning approaches where appropriate (as guided by data).
  • Robustness through novel algorithmic approaches to process imperfect data.
  • Transparency through introspection tools and visualizations.
  • Speed through vertical and horizontal scalability approaches. As we are an early-stage company espousing the "all hands-on deck" ethos, our needs are diverse and fluid. Expect ample opportunity to apply your strengths to help others including extensive collaboration with experimentalists to help assess statistical confidence in their data, design future experiments, or automate repetitive tasks. Qualifications and Education Requirements
    • Ph.D. or equivalent experience in computational biology, bioinformatics, or a related field plus 4 years relevant experience in a high-performing organization
    • Experience and comfort writing software in Python and C or C++.
    • Ability to effectively lead an organized and dynamic team in a fast-pace, deadline driven environment
    • Model evaluation and inference approaches (e.g. least squares regression, maximum likelihood estimation, expectation maximization, Gibbs sampling, Metropolis-Hastings sampling)
    • Unsupervised and supervised classification approaches
    • Familiarity with any of molecular biology, biophysics, analytical chemistry, systems biology
    • Statistics and probability, combinatorics
    • Strong data visualization and communication skills
    • Proven problem-solving skills and collaborative nature in fast-paced environment Preferred Skills
      • Performance analysis and optimization of parallelized algorithms
      • Implementation of distributed computational systems

Keywords: Nautilus Bio, Seattle , Senior Computational Biologist, Other , Seattle, Washington