Bioinformatics Scientist

Basecamp Research

London, United Kingdom

The Role

We are looking for a Bioinformatics Scientist to join our Genomics team in London. You will turn vast, heterogeneous, often downright strange biological data into annotated, trustworthy resources the rest of the company and our models can build on.

The heart of this role is understanding the data itself. Much of what we collect doesn't fit existing schemas or tools, so the job is not to just run a standard toolchain but to develop new methods that label and mine biology no one has characterised before. Because you understand both the biology and what the models need downstream, you know what the data has to become, not just correct but machine-readable and model-ready.

What you'll do

• Analyse diverse, messy biological datatypes, primarily microbiomes from a wide range of sample types, spanning both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, bringing the biological judgment to know when an annotation is a real signal versus an artefact.
• Develop new methods and tools to label and mine this data.
• Design approaches for biology that doesn't fit standard schemas, curate the data to be model-ready, and benchmark honestly to tell real improvement from noise.
• Prototype methods and validate on real, messy data at scale. Own light orchestration to prove or disprove an approach, then hand off to dedicated teams who take it to full production scale.
• Reach for newer ML methods where they are the right tool for annotation, labelling, or mining, and fold them into your approach cleanly.
• Keep the data trustworthy. Provenance, edge cases, and data integrity are part of the craft, not an afterthought.
• Help build outward-facing tools where the opportunity arises. For example, a predictive "oracle" that helps our field teams target regions of the planet where undiscovered biodiversity is most likely to be found, turning curated data back into smarter sampling and discovery.

About You

• You have a deep understanding of biological data and a strong core in sequence informatics (alignment, annotation, sequence analysis), with the judgment to know when standard tools are misleading or not right for the job. When a tool or method doesn't exist, your instinct is to build one - and the tools and methods you've built have been applied to real data at scale.
• You've curated data that went on to train real models or feed large-scale analyses. You're a capable enough engineer to make your methods real, but you treat engineering as the means, not the mission.
• You like to move fast, to ship, learn, and iterate at pace, without cutting corners on rigour.
• You are excited by the scale of the biology: genetic diversity that exists in no public database, and the chance to invent the methods that make it usable for the first time.
• You'll likely have a PhD in a relevant field, an MSc with 1-3 years of relevant experience, or a BSc with 3 or more.
• Low ego, collaborative instincts, and a startup mentality. You're comfortable with ambiguity and happy to wear multiple hats in a team where everyone contributes towards the company's success.

Nice to Have

• Experience building or fine-tuning ML models.
• Experience building production components and integrating with a workflow orchestrator such as Dagster or Nextflow.
• Experience with microbiomes, and especially with trickier components like viruses/phage or lower eukaryotes.
• Experience authoring or contributing to widely used bioinformatics tools.
• Experience with compiled programming languages (e.g. C++, Rust, Golang).