Bioinformatics Scientist (Data Science)

Research – Data Sciences           ·            Cambridge, MA             ·          Full time 

About Voyager Therapeutics 

Voyager Therapeutics (Nasdaq: VYGR) is a biotechnology company dedicated to breaking through barriers in gene therapy and neurology. The potential of both disciplines has been constrained by delivery challenges; Voyager is leveraging cutting-edge expertise in capsid discovery and deep neuropharmacology capabilities to address these constraints. Voyager’s TRACER™ AAV capsid discovery platform has generated novel capsids with high target delivery and blood-brain barrier penetration at low doses, potentially addressing the narrow therapeutic window associated with conventional gene therapy delivery vectors. This platform is fueling alliances with Pfizer Inc., Novartis Pharma AG, Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc., and Sangamo Therapeutics, Inc., as well as multiple programs in Voyager’s own pipeline. Voyager’s pipeline includes wholly owned and collaborative preclinical programs in Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, and other diseases of the central nervous system, with a focus on validated targets and biomarkers to enable a path to rapid potential proof-of-biology. For more information, visit www.voyagertherapeutics.com.

Bioinformatics Scientist: 

Voyager Therapeutics is seeking a Bioinformatics Scientist with demonstrated expertise and experience in Bioinformatics to join our Bioinformatics & Data Sciences Group. We are searching for a driven, enthusiastic, and self-motivated individual who is comfortable multitasking and working independently on various aspects of the platform. The position requires a strong technical background in computational biology and bioinformatics with an emphasis on utilizing and developing novel methods for engineering the next generation of AAV vectors. This individual will provide scientific, technical, and leadership expertise to a multidisciplinary team, emphasizing conceptualization, experimentation, data analysis, presentation, and strategic planning. 

The candidate will lead research and operation efforts at the intersection of AAV engineering, Bioinformatics and Data Science. The successful candidate will enjoy working collaboratively with AAV biologists and laboratory scientists, computational biologists, and machine learning engineers on a range of exciting scientific problems and cross-functional research projects.

Primary Responsibilities Include: 

• The successful candidate will work effectively with research teams to lead the design and implementation of computational tools and analyses of studies/assays, interpret results, provide a project outlook, communicate findings, and maintain active program timelines.
• Process, analyze, and interpret data for a wide variety of biological and clinically relevant projects to generate statistically motivated and computationally driven hypotheses. 
• Collaborate closely with experimental scientists to ensure that data is effectively utilized for high level impact. 
• Partner with Bioinformatics and Data Science teams to streamline and standardize the data analysis with workflow management tools (e.g., Nextflow), and scale up the analysis in the cloud environment (AWS).
• Prototype internal workflows to transition to production pipelines; implement data integrity and code/pipeline review processes.
• Work directly with the scientists to develop and train on consistent data management procedures around assay execution and data curation 

Education and skills requirements: 

• MS in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology or a related field and 3+ years of related genomics experience in industry or academia 
• Firm believer in the importance of data management, documentation, scientific reproducibility, and repeatability – FAIR principles
• Hands on experience with analyzing massively parallel NGS assay data: Amplicon Sequencing, bulk, or single cell RNAseq.
• Experience with building robust bioinformatics pipelines using workflow execution languages such as Nextflow, CWL or WDL
• Experience with provisioning and configuring computational and storage resources in a cloud environment such as AWS or GCP
• Experience with HPC and/or cloud environments and schedulers: Slurm, AWS Batch, AWS Fargate
• Experience with defining and building Docker images in the context of computational biology analysis with R and/or Python scientific toolchains
• Familiarity with the best practices of reproducible research in R or Python ecosystem
• Experience in applying best practices approaches to the secondary and tertiary analysis of single cell sequencing data in association with the experimental or clinical covariates

Nice to have: 

• Experience in analyses of data from long-read sequencing and spatial transcriptomics/genomics technologies
• Experience in fetching and integrating data from multiple sources (e.g., Benchling, BaseSpace, S3) and building LIMS-like web-applications or workflows
• Experience democratizing data and delivering data products using Posit, Streamlit, Gradio, Dash, or any modern web frameworks.

Please click here to apply.