Black Canyon Consulting

Overview

Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) in partnership with Medical Science and Computing (MSC) is searching for a Senior Software Developer (Big Data) to support National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. This opportunity is full time and onsite at the NCBI in Bethesda, MD.

The Senior Software Developer will work on solutions to support continued development of NCBI’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) – the world premier archive of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data and is a part of international collaboration that includes archives in Europe and Japan. SRA makes biological sequence data derived from NGS available to the research community to enhance reproducibility and allow for new discoveries by analyzing and comparing data sets. SRA is a BigData archive measured in tens of petabytes of stored data. The future development of SRA will make this data more useful for wide variety fields: Medical Health (genetic diseases, cancer, etc.), Public Health (food safety monitoring, antimicrobial resistance, viral outbreaks, etc.), microbial diversity, and many more.

NCBI is part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NCBI is the world’s premier biomedical center hosting over six million daily users that seek research, clinical, genetic, and other information that directly impacts biomedical research and public health – at NCBI you can literally help to accelerate cures for diseases! NCBI’s wide range of applications, platforms (node, python, Django, C++, you name it) and environments (big data [petabytes], machine learning, multiple clouds) serve more users than almost any other US Government Agency according to https://analytics.usa.gov/. 

Duties & Responsibilities

• Develops and continuously improves the SRA bio-informatics pipelines and bio-informatics algorithms by designing, implementing, and maintaining SRA bioinformatics pipeline software.
• Participates in large scale day-to-day operational activity.
• Develops tests and production releases.
• Works on reliability engineering topics with a goal of constantly improving quality.

Requirements

• Strong coding skills in one of the programming languages (Python, C++)
• Experience in parallel and distributed computing with focus on performance optimization, reliability engineering and efficient resource management
• Experience in design of testing scenarios for distributed systems
• Experience in Kubernetes
• Experience in messaging systems (Kafka)
• Experience in pipeline automation frameworks (AirFlow)
• Experience with logging, observability, and monitoring systems
• Experience with handling of bioinformatics data formats is a plus

Bonus Skills

• 5+ years of working with genetic and biological data
• Experience with MS SQL server, including XML typed data storage and manipulation
• Familiarity with NGS computational tools and formats (BWA, GATK, Galaxy, etc.)
• Demonstrated active involvement into open source communities (github, etc.)

Requirements

We attract the best people in the business with our competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, 401(k) plan with employer contribution, paid holidays, PTO, and tuition reimbursement.