Lead Bioinformatician — Drug Discovery & Omics Strategy

Placements24; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Pension fund

Paid time off

Leadership development

Scientific seminars and conferences

Job summary

Placements24 in Cape Town is seeking a Lead Bioinformatician to drive computational analysis for drug discovery. You will lead pipelines for genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics, and collaborate with experimental teams to shape target identification and validation.

The role emphasizes leadership, data governance, cloud-based workflows, and mentoring junior scientists, with exposure to cutting-edge technologies in a vibrant biotech community in Cape Town.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, CS, Statistics or related field.
• 7+ years in bioinformatics or computational biology, pharma R&D preferred.
• Proven pipeline development experience with omics data (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics).
• Strong statistical and machine learning background for biological data.
• Experience with relational databases (SQL) and cloud computing.
• Ability to lead, mentor, and communicate with multidisciplinary teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead development and maintenance of bioinformatics pipelines for multi-omics data.
• Design strategies for target identification and validation in drug discovery.
• Manage large biological datasets with data integrity and querying efficiency.
• Collaborate with experimental teams to guide experimental design.
• Develop ML models to extract actionable insights from data.
• Build scalable data infrastructure and cloud-enabled workflows.
• Present findings to senior management and research teams.
• Mentor junior bioinformaticians and data scientists.
• Stay updated on advances in bioinformatics and cheminformatics.

Skills

Leadership

Strategic thinking

Problem-solving

Communication

Machine learning

Biology intuition

Cloud computing

Data modeling

Education

Ph.D. in Bioinformatics

Tools

Python

R

SQL

Docker

AWS/Azure/GCP

Job description

Placements24 in Cape Town is seeking a Lead Bioinformatician to drive computational analysis for drug discovery. You will lead pipelines for genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics, and collaborate with experimental teams to shape target identification and validation.

The role emphasizes leadership, data governance, cloud-based workflows, and mentoring junior scientists, with exposure to cutting-edge technologies in a vibrant biotech community in Cape Town.