The University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research (UMCCR), led by Professor Sean Grimmond, has the mission to improve cancer patient outcome through genome discovery, translation and personalised medicine. It seeks to achieve this by advancing the molecular detection & diagnosis of cancer, prioritising therapeutic selection via Computational Oncology, and enabling programs in personalised cancer care.
Spanning more than 5000 square meters the UMCCR provides specialist laboratories for cancer cell biology, DNA biobanking, rapid large scale, HTS sequencing and organoid generation and testing. Once fully occupied, the Centre is expected to house more than 260 researchers. It is part of the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre located in the Melbourne Biomedical Precinct, an environment for more than 25 health services, academic research institutes and startups. We are building up a Genomics Platform Team to develop, test and apply accredited bioinformatics workflows to patient data and large scale research projects, evaluating new technologies at a rapid pace.
As part of this team we are hiring two Research Engineers to help us drive the development of our sequencing workflow system, bcbio, benchmarking and integrating novel methods into our system. You will work both on local HPC systems and on cloud-environments (AWS, Azure) and coordinate closely with GA4GH working groups to align our workflows with international standards. You will collaborate with research computing specialists to resolve computational bottlenecks and work with our international partners to develop emerging CWL/WDL-based infrastructure allowing bcbio and commercial solutions to be deployed on a variety of pipeline management systems such as Toil, Cromwell or Nextflow. Your skills will enable us to process samples from thousands of cancer patients and petabytes of data fast, reliably and reproducibly. Experience with cancer genomics is not necessary, but a strong background in software development is. You will be supporting the analysis of genomic data at scale and should be comfortable developing software for distributed systems.
* Postgraduate qualification in Computer Science or related discipline with experience in software development or an equivalent combination of relevant experience and
education in software development with a minimum of 3 years’ experience.
* Fluency in at least two programming languages
* Working knowledge of at least one major UNIX platform
* Experience with modern build systems and continuous integration testing
* Ability to rapidly iterate on prototypes while learning new subjects quickly
* Experience with distributed systems and complex infrastructures
* Excellent time management skills and project planning skills
* Effective communication and stakeholder management ability
Please see umccr.github.io/ for additional information regarding the Center, the open positions and the work we do.