Arc Institute

About Arc Institute

The Arc Institute is a new scientific institution that conducts curiosity-driven basic science and technology development to understand and treat complex human diseases. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Arc is an independent research organization founded on the belief that many important research programs will be enabled by new institutional models. Arc operates in partnership with Stanford University, UCSF, and UC Berkeley.

While the prevailing university research model has yielded many tremendous successes, we believe in the importance of institutional experimentation as a way to make progress. These include:

• Funding: Arc will fully fund Core Investigators’ (PIs’) research groups, liberating scientists from the typical constraints of project-based external grants.
• Technology: Biomedical research has become increasingly dependent on complex tooling. Arc Technology Centers develop, optimize and deploy rapidly advancing experimental and computational technologies in collaboration with Core Investigators. 
• Support: Arc aims to provide first-class support—operationally, financially and scientifically—that will enable scientists to pursue long-term high risk, high reward research that can meaningfully advance progress in disease cures, including neurodegeneration, cancer, and immune dysfunction.
• Culture: We believe that culture matters enormously in science and that excellence is difficult to sustain. We aim to create a culture that is focused on scientific curiosity, a deep commitment to truth, broad ambition, and selfless collaboration.

Arc scaled to nearly 100 people in its first year. With $650M+ in committed funding and a state of the art new lab facility in Palo Alto, Arc will continue to grow quickly to several hundred in the coming years.

About the position

The Arc Institute is seeking a Bioinformatician to join the Hsu and Konermann Labs. The successful candidate will play a crucial role in advancing the state-of-the-art in bioinformatics and contributing to major initiatives at the institute.

About You

• You are passionate about science and excited about answering questions related to gene discovery, genome engineering technology development, and complex human diseases.
• You understand the importance of collaboration and thrive when working with a diverse team of scientists and engineers.
• You are an individual with a deep understanding of biological sequence analysis, next-generation sequencing, and bioinformatics. 
• You are known for your ability to analyze/visualize complex datasets, build high-quality software, draw meaningful conclusions, and work effectively in a multidisciplinary team. 
• Your organizational skills enable you to manage multiple concurrent projects, and your curiosity and creativity drive you to continuous learning and innovation.
• You are familiar with ongoing projects in the lab, including our recent work on recombinases, developing genome engineering tools, and genomic language models.

In this position, you will

• Analyze NGS and genomic datasets, including metagenomic sequences, amplicon sequencing, RNA-seq, scRNAseq, and Perturb-seq, to generate new biological discoveries and insights 
• Contribute directly to ongoing academic projects in the lab in the fields of microbiology, genome engineering, and biological sequence analysis.
• Design and implement bespoke analysis pipelines of genomic and NGS data
• Develop, test, and maintain modular software pipelines to answer biological questions and evaluate new bioengineering tools 
• Build and curate large databases of relevant biological sequence data.
• Evaluate the performance of large genomic language models using common bioinformatics tools and techniques.
• Document code and processes using tools like Jupyter/RMarkdown notebooks, Python/R packages, Nextflow pipelines, and git/GitHub.
• Communicate analysis results to both experimental scientists and computational scientists effectively.
• Assist others in the lab in utilizing software packages and pipelines. 

Job Requirements

• Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genetics/Genomics, Bioengineering, Computer Science, or Statistics, with 0-5 years of industry/academia experience post degree.
• Hands-on experience analyzing genomic and high-throughput sequencing datasets.
• High competency with programming in Python and bash.
• Experience with Linux, git/GitHub, Docker, and Jupyter/RMarkdown notebooks.
• Experience building and managing databases (SQL, NoSQL, Bigtable, DynamoDB, etc.).
• Appreciate how choices in experimental design affect the data analysis process.
• Enjoy working collaboratively and cross-functionally with experimental scientists.

Preferred Skills

• Experience analyzing microbiological genomic and metagenomic sequencing data.
• Familiarity with data visualization and statistical analysis in R (tidyverse).
• Familiarity with cloud computing, preferably Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience with Snakemake, Nextflow or nf-core pipelines.
• Scientific background in microbiology, RNA-guided molecular biology tools, genome engineering, or functional genomics.

The base salary range for this position is $124,000-$148,000. These amounts reflect the range of base salary that the Institute reasonably would expect to pay a new hire or internal candidate for this position. The actual base compensation paid to any individual for this position may vary depending on factors such as experience, market conditions, education/training, skill level, and whether the compensation is internally equitable, and does not include bonuses, commissions, differential pay, other forms of compensation, or benefits. This position is also eligible to receive an annual discretionary bonus, with the amount dependent on individual and institute performance factors.