Associate Director, NGS & Bioinformatics

AstraZeneca•Santa Monica, CA

5d•$142,377 - $213,566

About The Position

AstraZeneca’s Cell Therapy division is seeking an Associate Director to join the NGS & Bioinformatics group within Cell Therapy Translational and Safety Sciences (CT-TSS). The role provides scientific and analytical leadership for bioinformatics efforts that generate translational and safety insights across the cell therapy pipeline, including CAR, TCR, and in vivo programs. The successful candidate will advance cell therapy programs by applying expertise in single-cell sequencing, multi-omics, computational modeling, and AI/ML.

Requirements

PhD in bioinformatics, computational biology, or a related field.
At least 6 years of relevant pharmaceutical industry experience.
Expertise in bioinformatics and computational analysis of scRNAseq and multi-omic datasets.
Experience generating translational and safety science insights from genomic or transcriptomic data in cell therapy, immunology, or tumor biology programs.
Deep understanding of cell therapy biology, immune cell phenotyping, and/or tumor biology, and current analytical methods for characterizing cell therapy products and their mechanisms of action.
Familiarity with bioinformatics pipelines for single-cell and immune-profiling datasets.
Proficiency in programming languages such as Python and R, including experience building and maintaining analytical pipelines.
Experience with cloud computing environments and high-performance computing clusters for scalable data processing.
Background applying AI/ML models to biological data, including prediction, feature extraction, and integrative multi-omic analytics.
Solid understanding of statistics and their application to biomedical science and clinical data.
Working knowledge of FAIR data principles, structured metadata, and harmonized data practices.
Exceptional verbal, written, and presentation skills for communicating complex datasets to scientific, clinical, and executive audiences.
Ability to collaborate cross-functionally, work with project stakeholders, and prioritize multiple projects in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

Lead scRNAseq-based analyses that generate translational and safety science insights for the cell therapy pipeline.
Oversee development and optimization of bioinformatics pipelines for single-cell transcriptomics and multi-omic data integration.
Apply and guide AI/ML methods and advanced analytics to derive actionable insights from complex multi-modal datasets.
Develop, validate, and operationalize program-specific and cross-trial computational models integrating longitudinal multi-omic and clinical data to address translational questions, including response prediction, mechanism-of-action characterization, biomarker discovery, and resistance profiling.
Evaluate, adapt, and implement AI foundation models for single-cell and multi-omic data, including domain-specific pretraining, fine-tuning, embedding-based representation learning, benchmarking, and deployment for translational and safety applications.
Guide assay development teams on NGS assay design, sequencing strategy, data quality requirements, and analytical readiness.
Interpret and integrate datasets across programs, and communicate findings and translational or safety implications to stakeholders.
Contribute to regulatory-support materials, internal strategy documents, publication strategy, and preparation of data for scientific conferences.
Collaborate with bioanalysis, clinical, data engineering, and IT teams on data management, workflow orchestration, and compute scalability for NGS and bioinformatics workflows.
Stay current with single-cell technologies and AI/ML models and use that knowledge to improve analytical approaches.
Mentor and provide scientific and technical guidance to junior scientists and bioinformaticians.