Bioinformatics Engineer - Virtual Cells

Join to apply for the Bioinformatics Scientist - Virtual Cells role at Prima Mente.

About Prima Mente: Prima Mente is a frontier biology AI lab. We generate our own data, build general purpose biological foundation models, and translate discoveries into research and clinical outcomes. Our first goal is to tackle the brain: to deeply understand it, protect it from neurological disease, and enhance it in health. Our team of AI researchers, experimentalists, clinicians, and operators is based in London, San Francisco and Dubai.

Role focus - Virtual Cells: Clearly articulate and interrogate meaningful biological hypotheses for marker and target discovery related to neurological diseases, via a virtual cell model.

Key Tasks:

• Set up and framework experimental hypotheses focused on available datasets and models, with downstream evaluation criteria to assess performance.
• Identify and curate public and proprietary datasets across different multi-omic, multi-modal types.
• QC and data analysis.
• Multi-omic bioinformatics pipeline development.
• Feature engineering and dataset preparation for downstream machine learning as well as foundational AI training and application.
• Work with experimental and machine learning teams to confirm and refine computational findings.
• Develop and manage specific external research collaborations with academic and industrial partners specific to AD biology.

Expected Growth:

• In 1 month you will be responsible for your own analysis and experiments on our cloud compute environment, involving creating an ad hoc Nextflow or Flyte workflow to massively process your data.
• In 3 months you directly own and have created an optimised analysis or data processing pipeline and generated results fit for patent and publication.
• In 6 months you have integrated your research into our AI models.

Who You Are:

You want to redefine what’s possible at the frontier of AI and biology. You have experience uncovering novel biology from multi-omic multi-modal data from Alzheimer’s patients as well as top tier publications and/or patents. We don’t expect you to check every box. Strong applicants often have depth in some of these and interest in growing into others.

Ideal experience:

• Top tier publications.
• Patent experience.
• First-hand experience with generating biological insights from biological data for virtual cells (genomics, epigenetics, transcriptomics, proteomics, ATAC-Seq).
• Operational software engineering skills: the ability to write high-quality code to be the backbone of our software stack.
• Experience with end-to-end tools used to process multi-omic data from raw data all the way to analytical outputs.
• Good working knowledge of workflow managers, including but not limited to NextFlow.
• Expertise with statistical approaches applied to evaluating biological datasets.
• Strong working knowledge with cloud computing environments, including but not limited to AWS.
• Domain knowledge with advanced artificial intelligence approaches and experience applying them to a biological context.
• Familiar with data wrangling, analysis, and visualisation libraries using Python (preferable), R or Julia.
• Strong data engineering knowledge, including but not limited to experience with Spark, Hadoop, NoSQL.

Location: Based in San Francisco, US or London, UK. We support visa applications.

Culture Insight: What we are doing is extremely hard. Prima Mente is for great people. We are team players who appreciate challenges, want to be hands-on, and thrive on curiosity by throwing away assumptions. We are focused on excellence at pace and huge personal growth. We are strong communicators who are highly disciplined and rigorous. Prima Mente operates with a flat organisational structure. We gain and share knowledge by contributing to multiple opportunities. Leadership is given to those who show initiative and consistently deliver excellence. We arrange our lives so we can work in person as much as possible.

Our Values:

• Exceptional performance at exceptional pace: The solutions we build demand uncompromising quality and rigour. The problems we are solving are grave and present.
• Inquisitive discovery: We embrace curiosity and creativity. Every question is a path to a transformational breakthrough.
• Radical candour: We practice unwavering honesty and transparency in all our challenges and interactions.
• Purposeful individuality: Every individual in our team is celebrated for their identity, uniqueness, and experiences. We are invested in each one’s bespoke personal development. Nurturing individuality will supercharge our collective purpose and spirit.
• Patient impact at scale: We have a steadfast commitment to improve the health and well-being of patients globally. Every experiment run, every dataset analysed, and every innovation developed, is a step towards achieving a scalable impact.

Seniority level: Mid-Senior level

Employment type: Full-time

Job function: Research, Analyst, and Information Technology