Bioinformatics Lead

London, United Kingdom / Full-time / Competitive with equity

About the Company

A well-funded biotechnology company developing personalised cancer vaccines designed around the unique mutational landscape of each patient’s tumour. By integrating biomarker discovery, tumour genomics and immunology, the company identifies cancer-driving mutations and engineers vaccines that train the immune system to recognise and eliminate malignant cells. The team operates at the intersection of computational biology and clinical oncology, translating research insights into therapies intended for real-world clinical deployment.

The Role

The Bioinformatics Lead will own and evolve the company’s end-to-end computational pipeline, from somatic variant calling through to neoantigen prediction. This is a pivotal position at the boundary of research and production: transforming research-grade methods into robust, traceable and clinically reliable systems capable of handling patient samples at scale.

Working closely with the scientific founders, the Bioinformatics Lead will contribute to algorithmic discussions while taking primary responsibility for engineering discipline, reproducibility and infrastructure design. The objective is not merely to run analyses, but to build a computational backbone that supports clinical decision-making, regulatory scrutiny and future product development.

What You’ll Do

They will design, implement and maintain production-grade pipelines spanning variant calling, annotation, filtering and prioritisation for immunogenicity assessment. Particular focus will be placed on somatic mutation detection in challenging contexts, including low allele fractions and circulating tumour DNA.

They will convert exploratory code into modular, version-controlled workflows with comprehensive logging, audit trails and reproducible environments. This includes containerising tools, orchestrating workflows with systems such as Nextflow or Snakemake, and ensuring consistent execution across cloud and on-premise compute environments.

The Bioinformatics Lead will evaluate and integrate tools for HLA typing and peptide–MHC binding prediction, applying a critical understanding of their assumptions and limitations. They will define data models and interfaces that enable traceability from raw sequencing data through to vaccine candidate selection.

In addition, they will contribute to infrastructure decisions, from cloud architecture and compute optimisation to internal tooling that enables scientists to interrogate results effectively. The role requires ownership of the computational platform as a living system, designed for reliability, scalability and scientific integrity.

What We’re Looking For

Required

• Deep experience in somatic variant calling, particularly in ctDNA, liquid biopsy or clinical sequencing contexts. A clear understanding of low-frequency mutation detection, error suppression strategies and the distinction between genuine variants and sequencing artefacts.
• Strong expertise in workflow orchestration and reproducible pipeline development using tools such as Nextflow or Snakemake. Proven experience containerising bioinformatics applications and deploying them across heterogeneous compute environments.
• Fluency in immunogenomics workflows, including HLA typing and neoantigen prediction pipelines. Ability to critically assess third-party tools and integrate them into coherent, production-ready systems.
• Excellent software engineering practice in a scientific context: clean, maintainable code; structured data models; version control; and rigorous documentation.

Nice to Have

• Experience operating within regulated or clinically oriented environments where auditability and traceability are essential.
• Familiarity with machine learning methods relevant to immunogenicity prediction and structured biological data.
• Experience designing cloud-native infrastructure and managing scalable compute for genomics workloads.

Why Join?

This is an opportunity to define the computational architecture underpinning a new class of personalised cancer therapies. The Bioinformatics Lead will have direct influence over how patient data is transformed into therapeutic candidates, working alongside founders who combine deep biological insight with clinical ambition.

The company offers a rare combination of intellectual depth and translational urgency: complex evolutionary and immunological problems, addressed with engineering discipline and deployed in a clinical setting. For a bioinformatics leader motivated by building systems that carry real therapeutic consequence, this role offers both technical challenge and meaningful impact.