Bioinformatics Engineer

Description

Join us at EIT:

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we're on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity's greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you'll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society. Explore more at .

Welcome to the Plant Biology Institute:

The Plant Biology Institute, headed by Professor Steve Kelly, is a key part of the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) Oxford. The institute aims to develop impactful and commercially sustainable solutions for improving global food production and planetary health through pioneering plant science research.

The Plant Biology Institute will unite world-class researchers who are focused on expanding the frontiers of plant science. Our research is focused on enhancing our ability to feed the planet while simultaneously improving the climate and ecosystem outcomes of food production. By embedding cutting-edge plant science research within an organisation that is focused on solving global challenges at scale, we aim to accelerate the timeline from discovery to global impact.

• Areas of exploration include:
• Improved plant productivity, both indoors and outside.
• Reduced reliance on inputs including water, fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides.
• Novel decarbonised plant-based production platforms for food and medicines.
• Advanced technologies that speed up discovery and deployment in plants.

Researchers will have access to state-of-the-art laboratory and plant growth facilities and have opportunities to collaborate with experts at the forefront of research on AI, automation, and generative biology across the EIT ecosystem. They will also work with global leaders in market development, commercialisation, and impact creation. The Plant Biology Institute has long-term substantial funding to support the unique scale and ambition of its vision.

Your Role:

We are seeking a highly motivated Bioinformatics Engineer to join the Bioinformatics platform team, which builds computational tools for plant biology in close collaboration with the phenotyping platform and research teams.

The successful candidate will work at the intersection of data, workflows, and compute capabilities, to accelerate plant science research. By building the bioinformatics data and pipeline infrastructure, your work will directly shape how data moves from lab instrumentation through to analysis, ensuring researchers can access reliable, well-structured data and reproducible workflows to drive their science forward. The role will require working with bioinformaticians, data analysts, and systems administrators to design, build, and maintain data and workflow orchestration solutions that meet the evolving needs of the institute.

The ideal candidate will have experience in leveraging cloud technologies to build and maintain scalable data and workflow solutions, along with a strong foundation in bioinformatics pipeline development and a collaborative approach to working across scientific and technical teams.

Your Responsibilities:

• Develop and manage the bioinformatics data and pipeline infrastructure, including versioning, deployment processes, and compatibility across compute environments.
• Oversee the design and development of scalable nextflow pipelines for processing omics data, either through direct development or by guiding others.
• Design production-grade ETL processes to integrate data from various sources into the Bioinformatics platform.
• Define and implement processes for pipeline performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and resource optimisation.
• Document pipelines, infrastructure, and workflows to support reproducibility and knowledge-sharing across the team.
• Collaborate with bioinformaticians and systems administrators to align infrastructure and workflow solutions with research needs.

Requirements

Essential Skills, Qualifications & Experience:

• BSc/MSc in Bioinformatics, Computer Science, or a related field and proven experience working in a compute platform environment.
• Proven experience developing and maintaining bioinformatics pipelines in a research or scientific environment.
• Strong programming and scripting skills, with experience in writing production-quality, well-documented code.
• Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with biologists, data scientists, and infrastructure teams to deliver research outcomes.
• Experience handling and processing large, complex datasets (e.g. genomic, transcriptomic, or phenotyping data).
• Good understanding of bioinformatics file formats, tools, and databases (e.g. FASTQ, BAM/VCF, BLAST, reference genomes).
• Experience with workflow management systems (e.g. Nextflow, Snakemake) for building scalable, reproducible pipelines.
• Experience designing data integration/ ETL processes.
• Awareness of data and pipeline engineering standards and willing to advocate for the adoption of best practices.
• Understanding of relational and/or non-relational databases for storing and querying biological data.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

• Experience using Seqera (Nextflow Tower) for pipeline orchestration and monitoring.
• Experience with data modelling for biological or research datasets.
• Understanding of FAIR data principles and metadata standards.
• Experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
• Experience with Kubernetes or managed Kubernetes platforms.
• Experience in plant sciences or agriculture.
• Experience mentoring or guiding junior team members or collaborators.

Benefits

Our Benefits:

• Salary dependent on experience + travel allowance + bonus
• Enhanced holiday + options to buy additional days
• Pension
• Life Assurance
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance
• Hospital Cash Plan
• Therapy Services
• Perk Box
• Electric Car Scheme
• Childcare benefit

Working Together - What It Involves:

• You must have the right to work permanently in the UK with a willingness to travel as necessary. In certain cases, we can consider sponsorship, and this will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
• You will live in, or within easy commuting distance of, Oxford (or be willing to relocate).