Position Title: Bioinformatics Scientist
Location: Mississauga, Canada
Employment Type: Contractual
Work Type: Hybrid (onsite at least 3 days every week in Mississauga Campus)
About Billennium:
We are a Global IT Services and Solutions organization Headquartered in Poland with our local Canada office in Mississauga and other offices across the globe including Malaysia, Germany and India. With over 22 years of experience and 1,500+ professionals worldwide, we deliver services ranging from technical solutions to full product development. Our client base spans North America, Europe, and Asia across sectors like healthcare, pharmaceuticals, finance, public, and automotive industries.
Role Overview:
We are a team of highly experienced and collaborative bioinformaticians and we are seeking a qualified intern to help us leverage state of the art AI for healthcare. Your work will involve research and development of AI based bioinformatics applications for multiple kinds of biological data, particularly next-generation sequencing (NGS). Working on the crossroads of state of the art in AI and bioinformatics will equip you with the skills and experience of applying AI in improving patients’ lives.
We are seeking a highly motivated and analytical Bioinformatics contractor to join our computational biology team. In this full-time role, you will be at the forefront of liquid biopsy research. Your work will directly contribute to the computational development of our next-gen NGS assays, helping push the boundaries of personalized medicine.
Key Responsibilities:
- Pipeline Execution & Optimization: Assist in developing, testing, and optimizing bioinformatics pipelines for the identification and quantification of genetic mutations from cfDNA NGS datasets.
- Data Visualization: Create clear, clarifying visualizations of genomic data, coverage maps, biomarker characteristics, to present findings to the cross-functional R&D team.
- Data Analysis: Analyze genetic mutations identified in cfDNA; propose and explore novel biomarkers; build reproducible machine learning models to quantitatively assess and validate biomarkers.
- Collaboration: Work closely with senior bioinformaticians to troubleshoot analysis strategies and correlate computational findings with clinical data.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Education: Bachelor’s or master’s degree or higher in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Science, Biostatistics, or a closely related field.
- Programming Skills: Strong proficiency in Python and Bash/shell scripting within a Linux/Unix environment and familiarity with good engineering practices including proper use of generative AI, version control, and documentation.
- High-performance computing: Proficient in scaling bioinformatics pipelines across HPC clusters using Slurm or equivalent to accelerate NGS data processing.
- Genomic Fundamentals: Solid understanding of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, sequence alignment, and structural variant detection.
- Machine learning: Familiarity with common machine learning concepts, models, metrics and frameworks (scikit-learn, pandas etc).
Preferred Qualifications:
- Familiarity with workflow management systems (Nextflow, Snakemake) and containerization (Docker, Singularity or equivalent).
- Prior exposure to liquid biopsy data (cfDNA/ctDNA) or cancer genomics.
- Strong track record of data analysis and publication in relevant fields is a plus