Lead Bioinformatics Scientist, NGS Pipelines & Cloud

Caris Life Sciences; Papago (AZ); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Caris Life Sciences seeks a Staff Bioinformatics Scientist to lead a team developing and maintaining NGS bioinformatics pipelines in a clinical/translational genomics setting. You will ensure reliable, scalable, and compliant solutions supporting research, assay development, validation, and clinical operations.

You will collaborate with laboratory, software, IT, quality, and scientific stakeholders to advance genomic testing capabilities, drive project plans, and mentor scientists in a

Qualifications

• PhD degree in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Biostatistics, CS, Genomics, Molecular Biology, or related field.
• 5–8 years hands-on bioinformatics experience supporting NGS pipelines, validation, or production.
• 2–4 years people leadership experience.
• Experience managing projects and coordinating cross-functional stakeholders.
• Strong knowledge of NGS data analysis methods, quality metrics, pipelines, and genomic interpretation.
• Strong programming/scripting skills (Python, Bash, SQL, R).
• Experience with AWS or cloud platforms for genomic data processing and storage.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, mentor, and develop a team of bioinformatics scientists, including hiring support and workload prioritization.
• Manage day-to-day bioinformatics operations and ensure timely delivery of analytical solutions across development, validation, and production.
• Establish project plans, priorities, timelines, and resource allocations for team initiatives.
• Oversee development, validation, and maintenance of NGS bioinformatics pipelines and workflows.
• Support end-to-end genomic data analysis including QC, alignment, variant calling, annotation, and reporting.
• Lead analytical development and validation activities for NGS assays, including performance assessment and documentation.
• Drive scalable, automated, reproducible computational workflows using best practices.
• Collaborate with software engineering and IT to support cloud-based infrastructure and data storage.
• Ensure bioinformatics processes comply with quality, regulatory, privacy, and security requirements.
• Partner with lab scientists, pathologists, clinicians, statisticians, and researchers to translate requirements into solutions.
• Monitor progress, identify risks, and resolve technical/operational challenges.
• Investigate and resolve complex pipeline/data quality issues in production.
• Serve as SME for workflows, genomic analyses, and assay validation.
• Stay current on technologies, tools, and industry best practices.

Skills

Team leadership

Project management

NGS data analysis

Python

Bash

SQL

R

Communication

Education

PhD in a related field

Tools

AWS

Linux

Git

Job description

Caris Life Sciences seeks a Staff Bioinformatics Scientist to lead a team developing and maintaining NGS bioinformatics pipelines in a clinical/translational genomics setting. You will ensure reliable, scalable, and compliant solutions supporting research, assay development, validation, and clinical operations.

You will collaborate with laboratory, software, IT, quality, and scientific stakeholders to advance genomic testing capabilities, drive project plans, and mentor scientists in a