Senior Scientist, Bioinformatics

About Arc Institute

The Arc Institute is a new scientific institution conducting curiosity-driven basic science and technology development to understand and treat complex human diseases. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Arc is an independent research organization founded on the belief that many important research programs will be enabled by new institutional models. Arc operates in partnership with Stanford University, UCSF, and UC Berkeley.

While the prevailing university research model has yielded many tremendous successes, we believe in the importance of institutional experimentation as a way to make progress. These include:

• Funding: Arc fully funds Core Investigators’ (PIs’) research groups, liberating scientists from the typical constraints of project-based external grants.
• Technology: Biomedical research has become increasingly dependent on complex tooling. Arc Technology Centers develop, optimize and deploy rapidly advancing experimental and computational technologies in collaboration with Core Investigators. 
• Support: Arc aims to provide first-class support—operationally, financially and scientifically—that will enable scientists to pursue long-term high risk, high reward research that can meaningfully advance progress in disease cures, including neurodegeneration, cancer, and immune dysfunction.
• Culture: We believe that culture matters enormously in science and that excellence is difficult to sustain. We aim to create a culture that is focused on scientific curiosity, a deep commitment to truth, broad ambition, and selfless collaboration.

 Arc has scaled to nearly 200 people. With $650M+ in committed funding and a state of the art new lab facility in Palo Alto, Arc will continue to grow quickly in the coming years.

About the position

The Arc Institute is seeking a Senior Scientist to join the Bioinformatics team within the Computational Technology Center. The successful candidate will play a crucial role in advancing the Arc’s Virtual Cell Initiative, which aims to create the foundational model that makes accurate predictions of cellular states and their responses to perturbations, and ultimately to help identify rational therapeutic targets for complex human diseases.

About you

• You are passionate about science and excited about answering biological questions related to complex human diseases. 
• You understand the importance of collaboration and thrive when working with a diverse team of scientists and engineers.  
• You are an individual with a deep understanding of computational genomics, bioinformatics, machine learning, statistics, next-generation sequencing, and single-cell multi-omics. 
• You are known for your ability to analyze complex datasets and work effectively in a multidisciplinary team. 
• Your organizational skills enable you to manage multiple concurrent projects, and your curiosity and creativity drive you to continuous learning and innovation.
• You possess outstanding scientific coding and software engineering skills
• You are experienced in project management within cross-functional teams.

In this position, you will

• Lead the efforts to design and implement state-of-the-art analysis pipelines for various high-throughput projects using best software engineering practices.
• Manage analysis projects for large-scale sequencing datasets (single-cell RNA-seq, epigenomics, multi-omics, Perturb-seq, spatial transcriptomics)
• Develop novel machine learning algorithms to get biological insights from the multifaceted genomic datasets.
• Lead computational side in the cross-functional teams tasked with developing novel genomic technologies.
• Mentor junior scientists in developing computational methods and utilizing bioinformatics tools and pipelines.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Science, or related quantitative field, with 5+ years of industry/academia experience
• Hands-on experience analyzing high-throughput sequencing datasets, especially on single-cell omics data (bulk and single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq, Perturb-seq, etc.).
• High competency with Python, git/GitHub, and Linux.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with wet-lab scientists.
• Strong statistical, mathematical, and analytical skills.

Preferred Skills

• Experience analyzing spatial transcriptomics, optical pooled screens, cell painting, and other imaging technologies.
• Familiarity with CRISPR screens technology and analyses.
• Scientific background in neuroscience or cancer biology.
• Experience with Nextflow pipelines.
• Familiarity with cloud computing.

The base salary range for this position is $132,250 to $183,250. These amounts reflect the range of base salary that the Institute reasonably would expect to pay a new hire or internal candidate for this position. The actual base compensation paid to any individual for this position may vary depending on factors such as experience, market conditions, education/training, skill level, and whether the compensation is internally equitable, and does not include bonuses, commissions, differential pay, other forms of compensation, or benefits. This position is also eligible to receive an annual discretionary bonus, with the amount dependent on individual and institute performance factors.