Senior Genomics Infra Engineer & Open-Source Maintainer

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Broad Institute is seeking an experienced engineer to serve as a primary maintainer for GATK, HTSJDK, and Picard. You will own standards, bug fixes, releases, and a community-driven contributor model, advancing VCF/GA4GH alignment with modern tooling and AI-enabled development.

The role offers high autonomy, collaboration with external partners, and a direct impact on decades of genomic tooling used by researchers worldwide. Expect leadership in standards and governance across Broad programs.

Qualifications

• Excellent written and verbal communication and a collaborative, community-facing disposition.
• Substantial professional software engineering experience building and maintaining production-grade systems.
• Typically requires 10+ years of related experience with Bachelor's degree; or 8+ years with Master's degree; or a PhD with 5+ years' experience; or equivalent experience.
• Proficiency in Java/JVM languages or a demonstrated track record of becoming rapidly productive in a large, mature, multi-language codebase.
• Strong Python skills for tooling, analysis, and pipeline work.
• Experience writing, testing, and deploying bioinformatics workflows in WDL or NextFlow.
• Deep working knowledge of genomics/bioinformatics: sequencing data and core file formats (BAM/CRAM/VCF/BCF).
• Demonstrated ownership of open-source or shared infrastructure, code review, release management, and sustaining quality.

Responsibilities

• Advance file-format standards support across the toolset (e.g., VCF 4.4).
• Author bug fixes and high-impact features across the repositories, upholding quality and tests.
• Drive a regular release cadence across the repositories and ensure updates reach downstream channels.
• Triage issues and review pull requests, backlog management, and prioritization.
• Help establish and run a Trusted Developer Program — onboarding external contributors.
• Support the user community, including monitoring on the GATK forums.
• Represent the project at conferences and GA4GH meetings and align priorities.
• Apply AI/ML tooling to accelerate development across large codebases.
• Explore LLM-based tooling to answer recurring questions.

Skills

Java/JVM

Python

Bioinformatics

Cloud pipelines

Open-source

GITHub workflow

GATK ecosystem

AI-assisted development

Communication

Education

PhD with 5+ years

Master's with 8+ years

Bachelor's or higher

Tools

Docker

GCP

AWS

Azure

Nextflow

WDL

Job description

Broad Institute is seeking an experienced engineer to serve as a primary maintainer for GATK, HTSJDK, and Picard. You will own standards, bug fixes, releases, and a community-driven contributor model, advancing VCF/GA4GH alignment with modern tooling and AI-enabled development.

The role offers high autonomy, collaboration with external partners, and a direct impact on decades of genomic tooling used by researchers worldwide. Expect leadership in standards and governance across Broad programs.