Wellcome Sanger Institute

Hello! Do you know UNIX and how to responsibly manage compute, and want to work in an academic environment? You could move to Cambridge and replace me. In fact you should do better than me, because it now says senior and I wasn’t a senior. I have really enjoyed working at this job, and I’m leaving it after a year and a half because I’m moving to the United States. It’s for a resource with genomes of parasitic worms. You’ll support a small community of researchers that study host-parasite interactions, search for candidate new drugs, and in general are worth supporting. The bread and butter of the job is writing and running code that moves data around and runs heavy computations on it, resulting in a new data release every few months. You’ll help researchers at Sanger with their use of the resource, reply to helpdesk tickets, write to ask people for data, and go to conferences once or twice a year. You’ll be a Bioinformatician, not a Developer, which means your code can be as good as you want it to be, but there are no brownie points for it. There is opportunity to develop more stuff - I’ve had a half a year long greenfield project - but it’s more important that releases happen, and that the data is correct. The team is tiny, and the amount of good stuff you do will be limited by how much time you have, so this really suits someone who can handle responsibility well. It helps to know Perl and have bioinformatics experience but you can learn both on the job if you meet other prerequisites.