Bioinformatics Analyst

DNAstack • Toronto, ON

1d • CA$70,000 - CA$95,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

At DNAstack, our mission is to power precision medicine by building software that breaks down barriers to responsible biomedical data sharing, discovery, and analysis. We build cutting-edge software and industry standards to help researchers and clinicians analyze sequencing data and make faster, more accurate diagnoses. Our platform supports national and international networks tackling rare disease, cancer, infectious disease, and more. We’re a nimble, cross-functional team of scientists, engineers, designers, and product thinkers working at the intersection of genomics, software, and cloud technologies. Our mission is ambitious, and so is our team.

We're looking for an experienced Bioinformatics Analyst to join our bioinformatics team on a full-time, 12-month contract. You’ll be responsible for developing, optimizing, and maintaining high-performance, cloud-ready genomic pipelines that can be run reproducibly and at scale.

You’ll work both independently and directly with external researcher partners in order to investigate, compare, and validate different approaches to omics data analysis, creating custom tools and pipelines where needed. You will use standardized and best-in-class technologies and write clear documentation to ensure that your work can be reused and built upon by the community. Projects span a wide range of disease areas and data modalities, including multi-omics integration, spatial and single-cell transcriptomics, and cross-cohort analysis on federated cloud research platforms. In this customer-facing role, you will act as a bridge between our external partners and internal product teams. You will analyze customer technical needs, guide them through implementation, and ensure they successfully leverage our platform for their biomedical research.

This role will work on a diverse set of projects, disease areas, and research questions in a fast-paced environment. A strong research background is required so you can quickly acquaint themselves with varied data types, analysis tools, and best practices as new projects and opportunities arise. You’ll help shape our product direction, build tools that matter, and play a big role in how we scale our impact.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in bioinformatics, computational biology, biostatistics, or equivalent industry experience
• 3+ years of hands-on experience building and running NGS analysis pipelines
• Ability to work in a fast-paced startup environment with a bias toward action, a willingness to learn new things, and a pragmatic approach to tradeoffs.
• Excellent troubleshooting skills—you’re the person others come to when things break
• Strong programming and scripting skills (Python preferred; R, SQL, Java, or bash also valued)
• Strong command-line experience
• Experience with workflow languages like WDL, CWL, Nextflow, or Snakemake
• Strong grasp of genomics file formats and tools
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills able to translate between technical and scientific worlds
• A background in biology/genetics with proven critical thinking and research skills
• Excellent communication and project management skills, with a proven track record of handling multiple customers, stakeholders, and concurrent streams of work
• Experience with single-cell or single-nucleus RNA-seq analysis
• Familiarity with spatial transcriptomics platforms and common single-cell data formats

Nice To Haves

• Experience with clinical genomics, ACMG variant interpretation, or diagnostic pipelines
• Statistical and visualization skills for exploring -omics datasets
• Familiarity with public datasets (e.g., gnomAD, TCGA, ENCODE) and FAIR data principles
• Experience working with biological databases or data integration projects.
• Experience with cloud computing (GCP, AWS, or Azure) or HPC environments
• Wet lab experience in genomics (e.g., sequencing library prep, assay design) is a bonus
• Experience with spatial deconvolution or multi-modal single-cell integration methods
• Background in a disease area relevant to genomic medicine (e.g., neurodegeneration, oncology, rare disease)
• Experience with cloud-based research analysis platforms or federated data access workflows

Responsibilities

• Work with the team to develop and optimize reproducible, scalable, and well-documented pipelines using WDL, Docker, and cloud-based infrastructure (e.g. GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Collaborate with partners in academia and industry to develop pipelines to process and harmonize a variety of genomics datasets
• Evaluate, compare, and validate analysis methods using best-in-class tools (e.g., GATK, bcftools, samtools, VEP, etc.)
• Support workflows handling a variety of -omics data types (e.g., WGS, WES, RNA-seq, methylation, tumour/normal, proteomics, etc.)
• Communicate complex bioinformatics results and methodologies clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Contribute scientific expertise to product development and strategy
• Stay current with new methods and standards in genomics and participate in open-source initiatives
• Contribute to team practices around high-quality product delivery and strong technical and scientific fundamentals
• Analyze customer technical needs to provide tailored recommendations for pipeline implementation, and train customers and partners on how to best utilize our platforms
• Improve product offerings by synthesizing customer feedback and advocating for user needs with internal cross-functional teams, including Product Management and Engineering

Benefits

• Remote friendly, with flexible hours and the opportunity to work on-site at our Toronto office
• Comprehensive health benefits: medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• Three weeks vacation
• Unlimited sick days
• Maternity and parental leave top-up programs
• One-time remote office set-up stipend
• Career development and learning support
• Opportunity to participate in DNAstack's Employee Stock Option Program
• Opportunity to contribute to open science and global data-sharing efforts

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level