Software Engineer, Open Search

Key Skills

AWS, Conda, Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery - CI/CD, Design, Docker, ETL frameworks, Machine learning techniques, Nextflow, Python Programming, R Programming, Snakemake

Job Description

A Bit About Us:

We are Arcadia Science. Arcadia is a science company founded and led by scientists. Our mission is to transform evolutionary innovations into real-world solutions by openly developing more efficient, replicable, and sustainable ways to leverage the biology of diverse organisms. 

The Opportunity:

Building a strong and creative data science team is critical to our success. Arcadia’s ambitious research goals require strategic integration of software engineering, computational biology, and machine learning tools across all aspects of our science. We are seeking experienced, impact-oriented Software Engineers to join our growing team. Our ideal candidate for this role has strong computational skills, experience working in a fast-paced environment, and has a natural engineering mindset. We are looking for excellent builders and problem solvers. Top candidates will have fluency in multiple coding languages (e.g. R, bash, Python), and will easily adapt to conducting analyses on different computational infrastructures such as AWS cloud computing. Given our goal of making our tools as open as possible while respecting the licenses of the underlying software and our translational goals, open source software experience is a big plus. You can learn more about our approach to computing at Arcadia here and check our existing projects on GitHub.

Open Search:

Note that this is an open search. For open searches, we provide a guiding framework below on general skills and expertise we need at Arcadia. We encourage candidates to be forthcoming about strengths and career goals. This search does not have a rigid timeline, so our response times may vary. Candidates should let us know of any relevant timing constraints on their end.

Responsibilities:

• Work alongside computational biologists, researchers and engineers to bring our latest computational tools into production as reusable software.
• Build proof-of-concept tools or pipelines to test and validate hypotheses.
• Design technical architecture specs for new computational methods and software based on the needs of stakeholders.
• Leverage computational biology, machine learning, and bioinformatics skills to both spur and implement research projects.
• Provide data, digital, and analytical support to discovery and early development projects

Education/Experience:

• BA/BS in computer science, engineering, bioinformatics, mathematics, or a related field
• Extensive experience (4+ years) in building production-level backend systems (ie running large scale ETL jobs or processing massively parallelized workloads using AWS Batch)
• Expertise in at least one programming language (Python or R preferred), with a willingness to adapt and learn new languages as needed
• Experience with environment management or containerization tools (Conda, Docker etc.)
• Experience developing complex multi-language pipelines using a workflow orchestration framework (Nextflow, Snakemake etc.)
• Interest in understanding of evolutionary and molecular biology (direct experience not required)
• Track record of taking new projects from idea to high quality technical products 
• Hands-on experience working with complex and large datasets
• Experience with open-source software and contributing to open-source projects
• Experience with software engineering practices (using version control, CI/CD pipelines etc.)
• Is highly adaptable and able to start and stop various projects as well as pivot with the organization as it grows
• Ability to move fast in an environment where things are sometimes loosely defined

Interested applicants should send a resume and GitHub or personal website link. Cover letter is optional. You will be asked to answer the following question as part of your application: “What is your proudest technical achievement (i.e. a product that you shipped or a project you delivered on)? Please provide technical details on the project and your impact.” (in max 300 words)

The expected salary range is $150,000-$225,000 per year with generous equity and benefits, depending on experience level.