Bioinformatics Engineer | Oxfordshire (Hybrid)

AI-Driven Crop Science Startup | Oxford | Up to £60,000 + Benefits

We are partnering with a well-funded Oxford University spin-out that is using genomics, AI and gene editing to radically enhance the world's most important crops. Wild plants have had half a billion years to evolve ways of thriving in almost every environment on Earth, and this company harnesses those natural innovations to boost farm yields and unlock gigaton-scale carbon mitigation. Genuinely impactful science, with a mission that matters.

The company is fast-paced, working from state-of-the-art labs, and about to enter an exciting phase of growth. As the science scales, they are building out their bioinformatics function and hiring a Bioinformatics Engineer to own and harden the pipelines the whole R&D effort runs on.

The Opportunity:

You will join the Trait Design team as part of a small but growing, high-impact bioinformatics function. To begin with you will take ownership of some of the company's key next-generation sequencing (NGS) pipelines, relied on by teams across the business.

This is firmly an engineering role. You will build, maintain and improve the pipelines that turn experimental data into results, not hand analysis off to someone else. As the team scales, you will help shape how bioinformatics grows with the company and take on bigger technical challenges as you do.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Taking ownership of the build, maintenance and continuous improvement of the NGS pipelines, adding features, resolving issues, and developing new pipelines as needs arise.
• Optimising pipelines to run reliably and efficiently on very large, complex genomic datasets, including parallel execution on cloud infrastructure.
• Driving pipelines toward greater automation so scientists can run them robustly without touching the command line.
• Working side by side with wet-lab scientists to understand their workflows, co-design sensible analyses, and make outputs easy to use.
• Championing good software engineering practice, testing, documentation and code quality, so the pipelines stay dependable as the company grows. You will work alongside two experienced bioinformaticians and a CSO who is a recognised leader in the field.