Senior NGS Bioinformatics Lead

Caris MPI, Inc.; Tempe (AZ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Caris Life Sciences in Tempe, AZ seeks a Staff Bioinformatics Scientist to lead a team delivering NGS bioinformatics pipelines in clinical workflows.

You will supervise development, validation, and support, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and ensure compliant, scalable solutions for research and clinical operations.

PhD required with 5–8 years of experience in bioinformatics, cloud computing, and analytics. Strong collaboration and communication skills are essential.

Qualifications

• PhD in a related field such as Bioinformatics or Genomics.
• 5–8 years hands-on bioinformatics experience with NGS pipeline development, validation, or production operations.
• 2–4 years people leadership experience.
• Experience managing projects and coordinating cross-functional stakeholders.
• Strong programming and scripting skills in Python, Bash, SQL, or R.
• Experience with AWS or other cloud platforms supporting genomic data processing and storage.
• Strong 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, onboarding, performance management, career development, and workload prioritization.
• Manage day-to-day bioinformatics operations and ensure timely delivery of high-quality analytical solutions across development, validation, and production activities.
• Establish project plans, priorities, timelines, and resource allocations for team initiatives and cross-functional programs.
• Oversee development, optimization, validation, and maintenance of NGS bioinformatics pipelines and workflows.
• Support end-to-end genomic data analysis, including quality control, alignment, variant calling, annotation, filtering, interpretation support, and reporting workflows.
• Lead analytical development and validation activities for NGS assays, including performance assessment, reproducibility studies, concordance analysis, quality metrics, and documentation.
• Drive implementation of scalable, automated, and reproducible computational workflows using software development and bioinformatics best practices.
• Collaborate with software engineering and IT teams to support cloud-based infrastructure, workflow execution, data storage, monitoring, and system performance.
• Ensure bioinformatics processes comply with applicable quality, regulatory, documentation, privacy, and security requirements.
• Partner with laboratory scientists, molecular pathologists, clinical teams, statisticians, and researchers to translate scientific and clinical requirements into analytical solutions.
• Monitor project progress, identify risks and dependencies, communicate status updates, and facilitate resolution of technical and operational challenges.
• Investigate and resolve complex pipeline, assay, and data quality issues while supporting production operations as needed.
• Serve as a technical subject matter expert for bioinformatics workflows, genomic analyses, and assay validation efforts.
• Stay current on emerging technologies, tools, methodologies, and industry best practices in genomics and bioinformatics.

Skills

Bioinformatics

Project management

Leadership

Communication

Genomics data interpretation

Quality metrics

Team mentoring

Education

PhD in Bioinformatics/related field

Tools

Python

Bash

SQL

R

AWS

Job description

Caris Life Sciences in Tempe, AZ seeks a Staff Bioinformatics Scientist to lead a team delivering NGS bioinformatics pipelines in clinical workflows.

You will supervise development, validation, and support, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and ensure compliant, scalable solutions for research and clinical operations.

PhD required with 5–8 years of experience in bioinformatics, cloud computing, and analytics. Strong collaboration and communication skills are essential.