Platform Bioinformatician in Warfield

Syngenta Crop Protection is a leader in agricultural innovation, bringing breakthrough technologies and solutions that enable farmers to grow healthy and nutritious food while taking care of the planet. We offer a leading portfolio of crop protection solutions for plant and soil health, as well as digital solutions that transform the decision-making capabilities of farmers. Our 17,900 employees serve to advance agriculture in more than 90 countries around the world. Syngenta Crop Protection is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and is part of the Syngenta Group.

In our continuing mission to enable digital science across Crop Protection Research and Development (CP R&D), we are looking for an experienced Bioinformatician to drive the development of new methodologies on our Bioinformatics Platform. The Bioinformatics Platform delivers core capabilities, including the capture, integration, analysis and visualisation of bioinformatics data to the wider R&D organisation. This role will drive innovation across genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics by prototyping new methodologies and integrating AI capabilities into a unified R&D digital platform, including LLMs and R&D agents. Within this role you will build a deep understanding of the discovery and development of new active ingredients, biological solutions, and novel modalities in soil health and biostimulants.

Key responsibilities will include:

• Researching, developing and evaluating computational approaches to address Crop Protection R&D challenges across multiple omics domains.
• Prototyping and developing bioinformatics algorithms and software.
• Acting as scientific expert for new and existing platform tools.
• Collaborating with domain-specific bioinformaticians across CP R&D to develop new approaches, share learnings, and drive innovation.
• Partnering with internal and external IT delivery teams to develop enterprise-level bioinformatics solutions.
• Acquiring and maintaining broad business and domain knowledge across target identification, plant and soil health, microbial biocontrol, resistance monitoring and prediction and human and environmental safety.
• Identifying opportunities for innovation and enhancing our science using digital technologies.

What we are looking for:

• MSc or PhD in bioinformatics, data science, applied mathematics or a related field, with demonstrated experience analysing omics data.
• Hands-on proficiency in Python and R for bioinformatics analysis, including building, validating and testing bioinformatics methods.
• Experience in two or more omics domains such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics or metabolomic analyses.
• Proven ability to develop and apply state-of-the-art bioinformatics methods to complex research problems.
• Experience with collaborative digital development practices (e.g. version control, reproducible workflows).
• A good understanding of experimentally derived biological data and appropriate analytical methods, including multivariate statistics, with awareness of data storage patterns, data formats and ontologies.
• Awareness of AI technologies.
• Prior industry experience in a life science or agricultural research environment is a plus.

Additional Information:

Our site Jealott's Hill International Research Centre UK is situated in pleasant semi-rural surroundings between Bracknell and Maidenhead and is the place of work for approximately 800 Syngenta scientists and support staff. Jealott’s Hill is one of the main global research and development sites and key activities include research into discovery of new active ingredients, new formulation technologies, product safety and technical support of our product range. Additional location within the UK can be also considered.

What we offer:

• Extensive benefits package including a generous pension scheme, bonus scheme, private medical & life insurance.
• Up to 31.5 days annual holiday.
• We offer a position which contributes to valuable and impactful work in a stimulating and international environment.
• The chance to work with and learn from highly qualified and experienced employees.
• A vibrant growth and learning culture and wide range of training options.

Syngenta has been ranked as a top 5 employer and number 1 in agriculture by Science Journal. Syngenta is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or any other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status. Jealott’s Hill has Disability Confident certification. We are committed to making all stages of our recruitment process accessible to all candidates and our Jealott’s Hill site are a Disability Confident Level 2 Employer. Please let us know if you need any assistance or reasonable adjustments throughout your application and we will do everything we can to support you.