Bioinformatician II

Position: Bioinformatician II
Site: MaRS Centre, Toronto
Department: Genome Sequence Informatics
Reports To: Manager, Genome Interpretation
Salary: Commensurate with level of experience
Hours: 35 hours/week
Status: Full-time, Permanent

The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) is seeking a Bioinformatician for the Clinical Genome Interpretation (CGI) group, part of the Genome Sequence Informatics (GSI) team. The successful candidate will function in an intermediate technical role that requires an individual with proven skills in both biology and computing, and who is dedicated to supporting a multidisciplinary team of scientists, laboratory technicians, and informatics professionals.

The Bioinformatician will provide support for the management and analysis of next-generation sequencing data and the operation of a high-throughput production sequencing data analysis pipelines in OICR’s 5600+ core HPC computing environment.

OICR has a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy in place that requires proof of full COVID-19 vaccination or proof of a medical exemption issued pursuant to the Government of Ontario guidelines. Accordingly, as a condition of employment, new employees who may be required to work on-site are required to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 subject to the duty to accommodate on the basis of protected grounds pursuant to the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Fully vaccinated is defined as having received all of the required doses of a Health Canada approved vaccine and having received the final dose at least 14 days before your employment start date.

As described above, the requirement to be fully vaccinated is subject to the Ontario Human Rights Code. If the candidate is unable to receive the COVID-19 vaccine for a reason protected by the Code, requests for accommodation from the vaccine policy will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

To learn more about working at OICR, visit our career page.

The responsibilities include:

• Developing software to facilitate uptake of clinical sequencing data by interpretation software
• Developing tools/software to evaluate performance and statistical validation of clinical sequencing data
• Perform final stage analysis on next-generation sequencing data of clinical cancer genomes and transcriptomes from sequence information to CAP/CLIA-certified reports
• Continuous interaction with the production development team to ensure that the NG sequencing software pipeline is consistently, reliably, efficiently and correctly processing data
• Ensure that data is managed efficiently, securely, and without loss or corruption through its lifecycle
• Investigating and/or developing cutting-edge bioinformatics software for potential clinical utility and integration within the clinical genomics pipeline (ie. mutation signatures, immune repertoire analysis, single-cell sequencing)
• Prepare clinical reports for sign-off by Canadian College of Medical Geneticist (CCMG) certified Director

Qualifications:

• Master’s (MSc) degree or equivalent experience in related discipline, with demonstrated experience in the skill set
• Demonstrated knowledge of cancer genomics
• Demonstrated experience interpreting data generated from best-practice pipelines for analyzing NGS data including variant calling pipelines for WGS/Transcriptome sequencing
• Significant knowledge of NGS data processing tools (samtools, GATK, IGV, etc)
• Proficiency working with large-scale datasets in a Unix environment
• Proficiency with a scripting and/or statistical analysis language is preferred (Python, R)
• Must have excellent communications and interpersonal skills