Senior Fullstack Software Engineer

The Centre for Population Genomics focuses on the development of cutting-edge tools and resources to facilitate the conversion of genomic data into improved diagnosis and treatment for Australians, the field known as genomic medicine. Ultimately, the Centre will generate and manage the largest sets of genomic and clinical data ever assembled in Australia, and apply these to solve a wide variety of scientific and medical problems. The Centre’s staff will operate from two physical sites: Garvan in Sydney, and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) in Melbourne.

The Centre for Population Genomics is in the process of launching the following efforts:

• A pilot program to sequence and analyze the whole genomes of 10,000 Australians from diverse populations, which currently are almost completely absent in genomic reference datasets. This will directly translate to significantly improved diagnosis of rare diseases for these groups.

• Over the next 5-10 years we anticipate that genome sequences will be generated for more than a million Australians, resulting in a raw dataset of about 100 PB. The platforms you’ll help build will need to scale accordingly.

• Building and applying new methods to directly improve the diagnosis of children affected by rare genetic diseases, such as the use of nanopore long-read DNA sequencing and single-cell RNA sequencing. This work will provide families across Australia with answers to their child’s mystery illness

THE OPPORTUNITY

The Centre for Population Genomics is looking for a Senior FullStack Software Engineer. You’ll be responsible for supporting large scale genomic analysis methods (using and extending frameworks like Hail) in conjunction with web-based tools (like the gnomAD browser or seqr) for providing intuitive access to complex scientific datasets.

This role will be a part of a small, high-energy software engineering team that will work in close collaboration with the Centre’s genomic analysis teams. The latter will consist of computational biologists and population geneticists, who will iterate with you on analysis methods, tools, interfaces, and visualizations. There will be a huge opportunity to work on the infrastructure and tools that support impactful medical research. All software developed by the Centre will be open-source and designed using best practices to ensure widespread use by the wider scientific community, and rapid translation into impact on human biology and medicine. You will work in an environment that combines the intellectual freedom and collaboration of academia with rigorous, open software development practices.

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