BACKGROUND

Immediate opening for a Master’s level scientist with a degree in computer science or bioinformatics/computational biology (or equivalent experience) to help an innovative, interdisciplinary, hospital-based group of clinicians (MDs and MD-PhDs) and basic research scientists develop, test, document, and maintain novel computational genomics resources (applications and services) and infrastructure on-site and in the cloud for translational (i.e., from the laboratory to the clinic) infectious disease and human genetics research.

RESPONSIBILITIES

See "Background" above. Responsibilities will also include systems administration of Linux (SLES and CentOS) and Windows (2008) servers running natively or under VMWare/Xen/Hyper-V virtualization either on-site or in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Looking forward, we eventually want to get out of the business of routine hardware maintenance and systems administration and contract these responsibilities out to cloud-based service providers. We especially seek to use the cloud, in conjunction with functionality-rich REST-interface-based wikis such as the MindTouch Deki Wiki, to expose large, complex datasets and offer compelling computational genomics services for research and education.

REQUIREMENTS

See "Background" above. Key generic requirements are resourcefulness, learning agility, a strong sense of initiative, and excellent oral and written communication skills. Candidates with experience using—and coding functionality that interacts with—public nucleotide and protein sequence databases, sequence alignment software, and related computational genomic resources will be strongly preferred. For application and service-oriented programming we generally use C# or (increasingly) F# under the .Net Framework and Mono, as well as Perl. However, we welcome expertise in Python, Ruby, Java, C++/C, Matlab, and especially R. Experience working with PowerBuilder, Sybase RDBMS, and VBA would be a plus for helping maintain and refactor legacy code. Familiarity with relational database design and implementation, SQL programming, and client data access programming using RDBMS such as MySQL and SQL Server 2008 also highly desirable.

TERMS: Full-time.

LOCALE

Pittsburgh is a friendly, affordable city to live in; has a pleasant climate; and has outstanding educational institutions, cultural amenities, and professional sports franchises.

COMPENSATION

Salary commensurate with experience, together with a competitive benefit package.

HOW TO APPLY

Qualified applicants should send their CV and have three reference letters sent to Ms. Tawanda Littlejohn (preferably by e-mail at tlittlej[at]wpahs.org), Center for Genomic Sciences, Allegheny-Singer Research Institute, 320 East North Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15212. Applicants with less than two years of post-graduate experience should arrange to have their transcripts sent as well.