Senior Software Developer (VDB)

Overview

Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) is searching for a Senior Software Developer (VDB) to support National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). 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.

The VDB team is responsible for developing and maintaining the database layer of SRA and a set of client-side tools that provide access to the SRA data for members of the research community. The current focus of the development effort is on utilizing cloud technologies to achieve higher stability, reliability and performance of the libraries and tools, while keeping the storage requirements of the SRA under control.

The team uses C++11 and Python. The development environment is Linux, gmake/Cmake, with github for source control, TeamCity/Jenkins for CI/CD. Some of the projects are also maintained on Windows (MS Visual Studio, Apache Ant). The team practices a form of Agile development process, involving daily stand-ups and test-driven development.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Development, implementation, testing, and continued maintenance of the VDB Library, the SRA Toolkit and related projects.

Participate in development of “cloud ready” tools and pipelines to support sustainable scalability and enable use by collaborators and scientists in the field.

• Learn new technologies, keep up with the internal systems, and share your knowledge with the team.
• Lead other developers.

Requirements

• 5+ years experience and demonstrated proficiency in Object-Oriented programming using C++
• Programming experience in a Linux environment.
• Experience with Cloud technologies:
• AWS: EC2, S3, Lambda
• GCP: GKE, Google Store, Cloud functions
• Fluency in some of scripting languages such as bash, perl, or python
• Ability to work with JSON and similar structured document formats
• Experience with network programming, multi-threaded programming
• Experience with SQL and relational databases
• Experience with open source projects
• Experience with Agile development methodologies
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, unit tests, integration and regression testing

Bonus Skills

• 5+ years of working with genetic and biological data
• Demonstrated active involvement into open source communities (github, etc.)
• Experience in multi-platform development (POSIX, WinAPI).
• Experience with containers (Docker)
• Experience with parsing tools (flex/bison) and design and implementation of domain-specific languages