Computational Biologist, NGS

Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms. 

 

Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms. Today, our foundry is actively developing multiple organisms to make different products across multiple industries.

As a Computational Biologist in our NGS group, you’ll support Ginkgo’s organism engineering programs by delivering insights from genomic, transcriptomic, and metagenomic datasets. By forming a collaborative loop with organism engineers, you’ll help design better experiments and reach conclusions faster. By adding your own expertise to an interdisciplinary team of bench scientists, computational biologists, data scientists, and software engineers, your role will be critical to developing world-changing methods for engineering biology.

Please note: we recognize that not all candidates may meet the entire list of Desired Experience and Capabilities. We’re eager to train the right candidates for this role, and encourage those who meet at least two-thirds of the criteria to apply. 

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with wet lab scientist on experimental design and analysis to develop and optimize new analytic approaches using NGS technologies
• Collaborate with organism engineers to plan projects, write proposals and design impactful experiments.
• Drive successful scientific collaborations across the company by contributing technical expertise. This might include identifying opportunities to onboard new NGS technologies.
• Understands company goals and effectively prioritizes multiple projects to align with them.
• Analyze and interpret sequencing data from multiple NGS technologies to support project success across Ginkgo. 
• Interface with software engineers to create and implement NGS data analysis pipelines for production use.
• Develop, run and monitor production code for data analysis
• Mentor junior engineers on the team. 
• Maintain high-quality documentation of your work and discoveries, creating written reports, technical presentations for internal or external audiences, electronic lab notebooks, internal database records, code comments, and software documentation.

Desired Experience and Capabilities

• • Master’s with 7+ years or PhD with 5+ years of relevant experience.
  • Experience working with NGS datasets with demonstrated strong skills in computational biology and software development.
  • Experience leading and managing cross-functional projects. 
  • Experience in mammalian systems a plus
  • People management and mentorship experience a plus
  • Proficiency with at least one software programming language such as R and Python.
  • Knowledge of best practices for collaborative software development (version control systems, test-driven development, and good documentation habits).
  • Familiarity with cloud services (e.g. AWS) and workflow management systems a plus.
  • Ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team environment.
  • Flexibility and willingness to learn in a rapidly changing, growing organization.

To learn more about Ginkgo, visit www.ginkgobioworks.com/press/ or check out some curated press below:

• What is it really like to take your company public via a SPAC? One Boston biotech shares its journey (Fortune)
• Ginkgo Bioworks resizes the definition of going big in biotech, raising $2.5B in a record SPAC deal that weighs in with a whopping $15B-plus valuation (Endpoints News)
• Ginkgo Bioworks CEO on scaling up Covid-19 testing: ‘If we try, we can win’ (CNBC)
• Ginkgo raises $70 million to ramp up COVID-19 testing for employers, universities (Boston Globe)
• Ginkgo Bioworks Redirects Its Biotech Platform to Coronavirus (Wall Street Journal)
• Ginkgo Bioworks Provides Support on Process Optimization to Moderna for COVID-19 Response (PRNewswire)
• The Life Factory: Synthetic Organisms From This $1.4 Billion Startup Will Revolutionize Manufacturing (Forbes)
• Synthetic Bio Pioneer Ginkgo Raises $290 Million in New Funding (Bloomberg)
• Ginkgo Bioworks raises $350 million fund for biotech spinouts (Reuters)
• Can This Company Convince You to Love GMOs? (The Atlantic)

  We also feel that it’s important to point out the obvious here – there’s a serious lack of diversity in our industry, and that needs to change. Our goal is to help drive that change. Ginkgo is deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all of its practices, especially when it comes to growing our team. Our culture promotes inclusion and embraces how rewarding it is to work with people from all walks of life.     We’re developing a powerful biological engineering platform, so we must remain mindful of the many ways our technology can – and will – impact people around the world. We care about how our platform is used, and having a diverse team to build it gives us the best chance that it’s something we’ll be proud of as it continues to grow. Therefore, it’s critical that we incorporate the diverse voices and visions of all those who play a role in the future of biology.   It is the policy of Ginkgo Bioworks to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees, employment applicants, and EOE disability/vet.  Privacy Notice I understand that I am applying for employment with Ginkgo Bioworks and am being asked to provide information in connection with my application. I further understand that Ginkgo gathers this information through a third-party service provider and that Ginkgo may also use other service providers to assist in the application process.  Ginkgo may share my information with such third-party service providers in connection with my application and for the start of employment.  Ginkgo will treat my information in accordance with Ginkgo's Privacy Policy.  By submitting this job application, I am acknowledging that I have reviewed and agree to Ginkgo's Privacy Policy as well as the privacy policies of the third-party service providers used by Ginkgo's associated with the application process.