Applications Close: 19 May 2025
Salary: £44,500 to £55,000 per annum depending on qualifications and experience
Contract Length: Full time, indefinite basis
We’re looking for a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer to join the Core Bioinformatics team and define the bioinformatics support behind the institute’s research into gut health, microbiology and food.
The Quadram Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to understanding how food and microbes interact to promote health and prevent disease. Located in one of Europe’s largest centres of life sciences, the Quadram Institute has close partnerships with the University of East Anglia, the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, the John Innes Centre, and the Earlham Institute.
Our Core Bioinformatics team maintains several platforms to facilitate the storage, analysis and publication of researcher’s data. IRIDA and OMERO instances archive sequence and microscopy data, respectively. Computationally intense analyses are completed on the on-site HPC cluster either directly through submitting Slurm jobs via the terminal, or interactively through the Galaxy instance or Cloudgene web service. Furthermore, we host a private OpenNebula Cloud instance allowing researchers to create customised virtual machines to complete their analysis. The Core Bioinformatics team also contribute to research projects directly by developing pipelines to analyse genomics and metagenomics datasets.

As part of Core Bioinformatics, the role will primarily consist of maintaining our infrastructure (in particular, the Galaxy Project server and OpenNebula Cloud). This aspect will require experience and familiarity with the Linux Command Line, including some aspects of server administration (ansible, systemd, etc.) and working knowledge of PostgreSQL or similar relational databases. The containerisation of software with Singularity or Docker is a key aspect of this role.
The job holder will also provide support to research projects, analysing NGS datasets (usually microbial genomics) mostly using Nextflow pipelines (publicly available or bespoke). The ability to troubleshoot pipeline executions and improve existing pipelines is essential. Knowledge of microbiology and microbial genomics is desirable, but the candidate must be willing to learn more about microbiology and microbiome and make efforts to keep up to date with the latest relevant literature.