Context And Mission
The Technologies for Biomedical Research Lab (TechBio Lab) 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, TechBio Lab’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, 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.
We are looking for a research engineer who:
· Is comfortable with benchmarking infrastructure for federated analysis and federated learning (not developing models or performing research on modeling).
· Is able to contribute to current software development projects.
· Is excited about developing software from scratch for biomedical research projects.
Key Duties
* Software Development: Work alone and collaboratively to develop new software that helps the group reach its goals.
* Software Maintenance: Work alone and collaboratively to maintain the group's software.
* Infrastructure Tooling: Build Python microservices, Docker/CI pipelines, and REST endpoints.
* Analytical Reporting: Create R/Python notebooks and/or interactive HTML reports for software and infrastructure checks.
* CI/CD: Be able to adapt to a CI/CD culture and contribute to maintaining and advocating for it.
* Collaboration & Compliance: Work with technical people, clinicians, and bioinformaticians in a professional and friendly manner.
Requirements
* Education
o BSc/MSc in Computer Science, Bioinformatics, or a related field with proven experience.
* Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
o Approximately 2 years of coding experience.
o Knowledge of coding and software development.
* Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
o Python (FastAPI/Flask, pytest, etc.) for infrastructure, software, and API design.
o SQL, Git, Linux, and familiarity with Docker/CI-CD.
o Exposure to healthcare and biomedical topics (tailored to the group's research).
o Experience with REST/GraphQL schema design.
o Experience with workflow managers (Nextflow, Airflow) or orchestrators (Kubernetes).
o HPC or cloud know-how (OpenStack, AWS/GCP/Azure).
o Exposure to privacy-enhancing technologies (synthetic data, differential privacy).
* Competences
o Good writing and presentation skills.
o Used to working under pressure and with strict deadlines.
o Strong personal soft-skills sets: communicative, enthusiastic, highly collaborative, proactive, self-driven.
o Fluency in written and spoken English.
Conditions
* The position will be located at BSC within the Life Sciences Department
* We offer a full-time contract a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance, support to the relocation procedures
* Duration: Until 31/12/2026
* Holidays: 22 days of holidays + 6 personal days + 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement
* Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona
* Starting date: asap