Software Engineer (II)

dnastack; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 125,000 - 175,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote friendly

Hybrid work with Toronto office

Health benefits

Employee stock option program

Professional development

Job summary

DNAstack is hiring a full-time, 12-month contract software engineer to design and develop genomics data platforms. You will tackle complex problems, build secure, scalable cloud-based services, and contribute to multi-tenant federated research infrastructure.

You will work with product teams, researchers, and industry partners to define requirements, review code, and guide juniors toward technical excellence while advancing reproducible bioinformatics workflows.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software development experience.
• Demonstrable understanding of systems, algorithms, and software design.
• Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field.
• Self-starter attitude, willingness to learn new technologies and passion for improving their own coding practices.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Share leadership in the design and development of key systems.
• Architect services for iterative development and scaling.
• Identify architectural and code weaknesses and propose solutions.
• Prototype, develop, test, and deploy applications.
• Collaborate with product team, customers, partners to define requirements.
• Perform functional and code reviews for readability and maintainability.
• Research and select tools emphasizing efficiency and security.
• Create design docs and maintain resources.
• Mentor junior team members towards goals and excellence.
• Develop notebook environments (Python/R) for bioinformatics analysis.
• Build reusable workflow templates for pipelines for public release.
• Support federated data access across multi-tenant cloud environments.

Skills

4+ years of software development

Strong systems understanding

Excellent communication

Education

CS/CE degree or related

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS/GCP/Azure

Job description

About DNAstack

At DNAstack, our mission is to power precision medicine by building software that breaks down barriers to responsible biomedical data sharing, discovery, and analysis. We build cutting-edge software and industry standards to help researchers and clinicians analyze sequencing data and make faster, more accurate diagnoses. Our platform supports national and international networks tackling rare disease, cancer, infectious disease, and more.

We’re a nimble, cross-functional team of scientists, engineers, designers, and product thinkers working at the intersection of genomics, software, and cloud technologies. Our mission is ambitious, and so is our team.

The Role

We are looking for an experienced, full-stack Software Engineer to join our team on a full-time, 12-month contract and help us design and develop products to power breakthrough discoveries in genomics and precision health. We are agile, move quickly, test and deploy continuously.

You can expect to tackle a variety of challenging problems, and design and implement robust, secure, and scalable systems across multiple cloud environments. You will also have the opportunity to define standards for the future of genomics. We are highly collaborative, and a lot of our work happens in partnerships and research consortia. We work with governments, public health agencies, pharma companies, patient advocacy groups, diagnostic providers, and academic researchers, tackling neuroscience, oncology, and other specialty specific areas. Current work includes building shared analysis infrastructure on DNAstack federated cloud research platform that serve multiple independent disease research consortia simultaneously.

What You’ll Do

• Share leadership in the design and development of key systems
• Architect services using well-accepted design patterns to allow for iterative development and future scaling
• Proactively identify architectural and code weaknesses and recommend appropriate solutions
• Prototype, develop, test, and deploy applications
• Work with the product team, collaborate with customers, partners, and peers to identify product requirements
• Perform functional and code reviews, contributing to the overall readability and maintainability of code
• Research and select the appropriate tools for new or existing applications, with emphasis on efficiency and security
• Create system design and application documentation and maintain resources
• Guide junior members of our team towards strategic goals and technical excellence
• Develop and maintain notebook environments (Python/R) for reproducible cross-dataset bioinformatics analysis
• Build reusable workflow templates for spatial and single-cell integration pipelines intended for public release
• Support federated data access across multi-tenant cloud environments connecting independent disease research consortia on shared infrastructure

What We’re Looking For

Technologies

We’re looking for strong background in at least a subset of the following technologies, and interest in learning the rest:

• Java (Spring Boot, Lombok, JUnit5, Mockito, Micrometer, Liquibase)
• Python (uv, poetry, pytest, click, pandas, polars)
• TypeScript (Angular, RxJS, Storybook.js, Chromatic, Jasmine + Karma)
• Microservices, Docker, and Kubernetes
• Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Databases and query engines (PostgreSQL, BigQuery, RedShift, Trino)
• Logging, Monitoring & Metrics (Datadog, Grafana)
• AI-assisted development (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot)
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Concourse, blue-green deployments)
• Cloud-native application patterns (12-factor methodology, stateless services, microservices, configuration management, secret handling)
• API development (REST, OpenAPI, Swagger, Postman/Insomnia)
• Git (trunk-based development, feature branches, pull request reviews)
• Shell scripting (Bash, Unix, automation)
• WDL / Cromwell (workflow orchestration for bioinformatics pipelines)
• GCS-native data access patterns for large genomics file types (BAM, h5ad, Visium) and distributed processing of sparse matrices

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software development experience
• Demonstrable understanding of systems, algorithms, and software design
• Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field
• Self-starter attitude, willingness to learn new technologies and passion for improving their own coding practices
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Nice to Have

• Experience working with and analyzing big data in a distributed environment
• Experience and aptitude with lean-development principles, including:
• Understanding the dangers of over-engineering an MVP
• Not sacrificing solutions for today’s problems, for concerns about tomorrow’s
• Familiarity with & respect for principles such as DRY, KISS, SOLID, CUPID, YAGNI, INVEST, Swiss cheese model, etc.
• Experience in healthcare or life sciences
• Experience analyzing requirements and communicating solutions, especially in collaboration with partners and customers

Why This Role Is Exciting

• Impact at scale: Your work will directly influence tools used by national and international genomics networks.
• Build something new: Shape a core function of the company from a small, senior team into a scalable, sustainable group.
• Cross-disciplinary collaboration: Work side by side with engineers, product managers, and scientists to turn bioinformatics into real-world solutions.
• Mission-driven: Contribute to solving rare disease, cancer, and infectious disease challenges by enabling precision medicine.
• Team culture: Enjoy a flexible, remote-friendly team culture along with a competitive salary, benefits, and employee stock option program.

Where You’ll Work

This role offers the flexibility of remote work, with the option to work in person from our Toronto office. This arrangement supports your needs and promotes a healthy work-life balance.

Eligibility

To be considered for this position, you must be eligible to work in Canada.

Benefits

• Remote friendly, with flexible hours and the opportunity to work on-site at our Toronto office
• Comprehensive health benefits: medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• Three weeks vacation
• Unlimited sick days
• Maternity and parental leave top-up programs
• One-time remote office set-up stipend
• Career development and learning support
• Opportunity to participate in DNAstack's Employee Stock Option Program
• Opportunity to contribute to open science and global data-sharing efforts

The salary range for this role is $125,000 to $175,000. At DNAstack, we are dedicated to providing pay transparency to all candidates. Compensation at DNAstack is determined through various factors including but not limited to: comparable salary market data within Canada, technical skill assessment, a holistic view of previous work history, and internal pay equity with other DNAstack team members.

DNAstack is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. In accordance with the appropriate legislation in each jurisdiction in which we operate, we ensure that our team members are compensated within equal pay ranges for work of equal value, regardless of gender.

We regularly review our compensation practices to identify and address any pay equity gaps. Our approach considers skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions to ensure that compensation decisions are objective, transparent, and free from bias.

Pay equity is an ongoing process, and we are committed to maintaining compliance with legislative requirements while fostering a workplace that values fairness, respect, and inclusion. At DNAstack, we are committed to building and fostering an inclusive, accessible environment for everyone. If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding accessibility needs at any stage of the interview process, please contact [e-mail] and we will work with you to meet your needs.

As a small but mighty team, we use AI-powered tools to help us stay organized and efficient during our hiring processes. These tools help in areas such as sorting applications and highlighting matches to the role. These tools help us move faster, but they definitely don't make decisions for us - every application is reviewed by a real human on our team.

Your privacy matters to us. Any information you share is handled according to Ontario privacy laws as well as our internal privacy practices. If you have any questions about how we use AI in our hiring process, please reach out to [e-mail].

Note: this posting is for an existing vacancy that we are seeking to fill.

For compliance reasons, all offers of employment at DNAstack are conditional upon a successful background check that may consist of prior employment verification, reference checks, education confirmation, criminal background, or other information, as permitted by law.