Bioinformatics Scientific Quality Engineer
Redwood City, CA

Job Description

The Company

QIAGEN Bioinformatics is a leading provider of software and knowledge bases used by life scientists to gain insight from the molecular information in their biological samples. We have developed industry-leading software tools for analysis and reporting of biological data. We are passionate about our users, products, and our vision, and are seeking smart, motivated engineers and scientists who are eager to join our team in creating software that actually helps improve people's lives. Our mission is to make improvements in life possible. We accomplish this by designing tools used in labs all over the world to facilitate scientific discovery and progress, focused in genomics.

Located in Redwood City, CA, QIAGEN offers a professional work environment, competitive benefits, and values work-life balance.

The Content Quality Group

At QIAGEN, we have built a world-class knowledge base (KB) rich with molecular and functional relationships derived from scientific literature and biological databases. By structuring previously unstructured biological knowledge, the KB provides the foundation for our biomedical data-interpretation capabilities. The content quality group is responsible for testing the accuracy and completeness of the KB and the usage of the content in our product applications. The work is critically important for ensuring the quality of the analyses our customers rely on.

The Position

As a Bioinformatics Scientific Quality Engineer, you will be part of a collaborative, cross-functional team of biological content scientists, knowledge engineers, and software engineers building powerful tools to gain biological insight into RNA-Seq and DNA-Seq data. You will use your background in biological science and programming skills to assure the scientific quality of biological interpretations, supporting analytics, and information in our applications. In combination with our Knowledge Base, we use semantic technologies and other computational techniques to provide biological context to our analytics. You will develop scalable methods to assess the correctness and completeness of our biological information and the accuracy and reliability of our analytics and interpretations. This is an excellent opportunity to be directly involved in developing our technology, delivering a high-quality product, and making an impact on human healthcare.

Duties/Responsibilities:

* Work with product managers, biologists, and developers to understand requirements, use cases, and workflows of new and exciting product features. Ensure the features are scientifically valid, useful, and technically robust.
* Think critically about our technology and develop methods for testing scientific quality. Write and maintain tests and automation that can find issues in our biomedical information, determine when analytics may be faulty, or when interpretations are unexpected or not well-supported.
* Analyze and report defects found with tests and assess risk. Be a passionate voice of our scientific product customers internally. Evaluate, prioritize, and escalate issues as necessary.
* Work with scientists and developers to assure the quality of processes, tools, and models for developing, delivering and maintaining our biological content.
* Perform end-to-end content testing including scientific evaluation of product features. Provide expert scientific and analytic guidance for improvements.

Position Requirements

* Strong background in genetics and molecular biology
* Familiarity with bioinformatics tools in genome biomedical research (e.g. genomic databases, genome browsers, mutation repositories)
* Proven ability to solve problems using programming skills, especially in Perl, Python, or Java. 10+ years of experience or formal or advanced training preferred.
* Experience with database design and programming (e.g. SQL, Oracle).
* Graduate degree (PhD-level preferred) in genetics, molecular biology, bioinformatics, or related field.

Preferred (one or more of the following):

* Strong understanding of medical genetics, pharmacogenetics, molecular pathology, or oncology
* Experience in curation from literature (e.g. primary research articles, clinical trials, drug labels, clinical practice guidelines), familiarity with DNA sequence analysis, or NGS data interpretation
* Knowledge of information extraction (IE), data integration, ontology, semantic technology, or natural language processing (NLP)
* Knowledge of software development best practices, quality controls, testing techniques.
* 10+ years of experience in a product development, industry, or clinical lab setting.

Personal Requirements

* Excellent critical and analytical thinking with strong attention to detail.
* Energetic and open-minded individual with excellent verbal and written communication skills.
* Enthusiasm to learn new technologies, explore diverse content, and algorithms.

QIAGEN is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.