Senior Software Developer (C++) in Bioinformatics and Big Data

Overview

Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) is searching for a Sr. Software Developer in Bioinformatics and Big Data to support our work for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), an institute of the National Institutes of Health. This opportunity is full time and onsite at the NIH-NCBI in Bethesda, MD and/or remote work.

NCBI, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the nation’s premier biomedical resource, is seeking a software developer to help deliver biological sequence annotation and data curation infrastructure for the nation’s foremost sequence and biomedical literature repositories. Sites at NCBI, a part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), see four million daily users searching for gene sequence data, biomedical journal citations, and a wide array of other information that directly impacts biomedical research and public health. NCBI’s annotation pipelines not only serve these diverse expert communities – they actually drive new life sciences discoveries, ranging from medical health (viruses and pandemics, genetic diseases, cancer) to public health (food safety monitoring, antimicrobial resistance, viral outbreaks), to basic research topics in computational biology, bioinformatics and microbial diversity, and many more.

On a technical level, NCBI’s wide range of applications, platforms (e.g. node, Python, Django, C++), and applications and environments (petabyte-level big data, multiple cloud providers) serve more users than the US Postal Service and see more traffic than the IRS at tax time. We embrace FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and are on the cutting edge of civic tech and cloud computing.

This role calls for more than an expert coder and architect – someone who can work equally effectively with subject-matter experts, user researchers, designers, product managers, scientists, security and DevOps engineers, and more. Work with teams of dedicated, skilled developers, researchers, and product professionals as you build robust, flexible solutions serving dozens of production applications, APIs and services. Join us!

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Responsible for the development, implementation, testing, and continued maintenance of NCBI bioinformatics software and information retrieval systems
• Work with a diverse group of scientists, bioinformaticians and other developers across the center to implement efficient bioinformatics algorithms
• Learn new technologies, keep up with internal systems, and share your knowledge with the team

Required qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience handling large amounts of data or working in a distributed computing environment
• Programming experience in a Linux environment
• Proficiency in C++
• Experience with MS SQL server and relational database design and optimization
• Fluency in some scripting languages such as BASH, csh, Perl, or Python

Preferred qualifications:

• 5+ years of working with genetic and biological data
• Proficiency in Python and/or JavaScript and familiarity with their associated ecosystems
• Experience with MongoDB or other NoSQL database technology
• Experience with Docker or other containerization mechanisms
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, unit testing, integration and regression testing
• Experience using GitHub
• Experience with Cloud technologies a strong plus