Job Reference
42_26_LS_TBR_RE1
Position
Research Engineer Securing Processing Environments for Analysing Sensitive Data (RE1)
Closing Date
Monday, 09 February, 2026
Reference: 42_26_LS_TBR_RE1
Job title: Research Engineer Securing Processing Environments for Analysing Sensitive Data (RE1)
About BSC
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU, the Joint Undertaking that leads large-scale investments and HPC provision in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 1000 staff from 60 countries.
Look at the BSC experience:
BSC-CNS YouTube Channel
Let's stay connected with BSC Folks
We are particularly interested for this role in the strengths and lived experiences of women and underrepresented groups to help us avoid perpetuating biases and oversights in science and IT research. In instances of equal merit, the incorporation of the under-represented sex will be favoured.
We promote Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, fostering an environment where each and every one of us is appreciated for who we are, regardless of our differences.
If you consider that you do not meet all the requirements, we encourage you to continue applying for the job offer. We value diversity of experiences and skills, and you could bring unique perspectives to our team.
Context And Mission
The Technologies for Biomedical Research Lab (TechBioLab) within the Life Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) brings together specialised teams to enable research activities in the Life Sciences. These teams cover a range of areas, including research data and software, infrastructure for centralized and federated analysis and learning, etc. From a technical perspective, TechBioLab's activities focus on developing infrastructures that support Life Sciences research, including software components for bioinformatics, research data management– especially in healthcare–and scientific and technical benchmarking of research software in close collaboration with various communities and projects. Special attention is given to technological developments enabling the analysis of sensitive data in federated settings. This approach facilitates the generation of AI models without requiring data to be moved from its original site. Complementing these efforts, the lab also contributes to the development of Trusted Research Environments that enable the use of research data on single sites under specific, configurable usage conditions.
The laboratory coordinates the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB). The Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB) is the major bioinformatics platform in Spain and the Spanish node of ELIXIR. ELIXIR (European Life Science Infrastructure for Biological Information) is a pan-European organization founded in 2014 which aims to integrate and harmonize European bioinformatics infrastructures. ELIXIR coordinates the participation of more than 22 countries; engages with other strategic European initiatives and projects, e.g. ESFRI, Research Data Alliance, EUDat and EGI; promotes specific training activities and workshops on ELIXIR resources, partners with industry, and play a key role in shaping the bioinformatics landscape. Within ELIXIR, the INB is responsible for the bioinformatics infrastructure offered by Spain and, therefore, should guarantee its alignment with the strategic areas put forward by ELIXIR.
Since 2018, the INB has two overarching objectives: deepen the alignment of its activities with ELIXIR, and increase the translational impact of INB actions towards the Spanish National Health System (SNS). For the latter objective, the INB has created and supports TransBioNet (Translational Bioinformatics Network), which aims to structure, bring together and work with bioinformatics groups in healthcare settings with a particular focus on the Health Research Institutes (IIS) recognized by the ISCIII.
The INB coordinates the Data Science programme within the Spanish Infrastructure for Personalized Medicine associated with Science and Technology (IMPaCT in Spanish), which aims to establish an interoperable framework for biomedical data integration and analysis, addressing questions from clinicians through the implementation of computing systems in health environments. This programme will prepare clinical data in Spain for secondary use, including medical imaging, structured and non-structured clinical data and genomics, considering all the legal provisions for each possible use and setting. This programme will involve the liaison with diverse stakeholders, including hospitals, the ISCIII, companies in the biomedical sector, the Spanish Medicines Agency and biomedical researchers, among others. All developments will be aligned with the European initiatives in the area, including those from ELIXIR, 1+Million Genomes, the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and data-sharing projects such as FAIR4Health, HealthyCloud and TEHDAS. In 2023 the INB, the Spanish Node of ELIXIR, renovated its portfolio of bioinformatics resources, including platforms, databases, individual tools and web-services. This portfolio, known as Service Delivery Plan (SDP), constitutes the scientific-technical contribution of Spain to ELIXIR.
The candidate will join a dynamic Life Sciences department team, working in the highly cooperative, multidisciplinary, distributed context of ELIXIR and INB (Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute/ELIXIR-ES) and related national initiatives, such as TransBioNet.
Existing and upcoming regulations, like the European Health Data Space, Data Governance Act or Artifficial Intelligence Act, will accelerate existing technological developments to facilitate the analysis of sensitive data (e.g. patient-level data, IPR-protected data, etc…) in dedicated environments for that end. In this context, the INB Computational Node has developed a virtual research environment (openVRE) that is being utilised in various projects at local, national and European projects. The openVRE offers a controlled, sandboxed environment where incoming and outgoing data is pre-configured as well as the software, either individual tools or complete analytical pipelines, and the management of users. This major development is completed by WfExS ) which is a high-level workflow orchestrator designed to facilitate the analysis of sensitive data. WfExS implements community-driven standards to facilitate the technical interoperability with other existing solutions in the community.
Currently, those pieces are brought together as part of the EU-funded EOSC-ENTRUST project ( which aims to build a blueprint at European level interconnecting different Secure Processing Environments (sometimes referred as Trusted Research Environments) taking into