Remote Principal Bioinformatician: Lead Genomic Pipelines & Discovery

Placements24; Pietermaritzburg; Hybrid; ZAR 2,635,000 - 3,952,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Professional development budget

Remote work flexibility

Work-life balance

Job summary

Placements24 seeks a Principal Bioinformatician to lead sophisticated pipelines for WGS, RNA-Seq, and other large genomic datasets in a fully remote setting. You will guide cross-disciplinary teams of researchers, develop novel analytical methods, and drive high-impact scientific outputs from home-based work.

You will mentor junior staff, collaborate with clinicians and geneticists, and contribute to publications and grant applications while ensuring data quality and privacy compliance.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genetics, or related field.
• 7+ years of progressive experience with large-scale genomic data.
• Experience with Ensembl/UCSC, GATK, SAMtools, and BCFtools.
• Proficiency in Python, R, Perl, and shell scripting.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and implementation of advanced bioinformatics pipelines for WGS, WES, RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq.
• Develop and apply statistical methods for variant detection, annotation, and interpretation.
• Analyze genomic and transcriptomic data to identify biomarkers and targets.
• Collaborate with geneticists, biologists, and clinicians to guide research directions.
• Maintain data management and curation strategies for genomic repositories.
• Mentor and guide junior bioinformaticians and staff.
• Publish and contribute to grants and high-impact journals.
• Stay updated on bioinformatics tools, algorithms, and sequencing tech.
• Ensure data quality, reproducibility, and privacy standards.
• Present findings at conferences and internal meetings.

Skills

Python

R

Perl

Shell scripting

Leadership

mentoring

Education

Ph.D. in Bioinformatics

Tools

Ensembl

UCSC Genome Browser

GATK

SAMtools

BCFtools

Docker

Singularity

AWS

Google Cloud

Azure

Job description

Placements24 seeks a Principal Bioinformatician to lead sophisticated pipelines for WGS, RNA-Seq, and other large genomic datasets in a fully remote setting. You will guide cross-disciplinary teams of researchers, develop novel analytical methods, and drive high-impact scientific outputs from home-based work.

You will mentor junior staff, collaborate with clinicians and geneticists, and contribute to publications and grant applications while ensuring data quality and privacy compliance.