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,, 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 (, 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 account different deployment scenarios, maturation levels and users requirements. Thus, the objective is, therefore, to bring together all existing technological components, incorporate the regulatory perspective and make the necessary developments to upgrade existing technological products or create new ones if necessary, having into account that any development should be sustainable and highly flexible to facilitate its broad use across projects and deployment scenarios.
Este contrato se encuentra financiado por el proyecto “DESARROLLO DE MODELOS DEL LENGUAJE EN EL MARCO DEL PLAN NACIONAL DE TECNOLOGÍAS DEL LENGUAJE, EL PERTE DE NUEVA ECONOMÍA DE LA LENGUA Y EL PLAN DE RECUPERACIÓN, TRANSFORMACIÓN Y RESILIENCIA- FINANCIADO POR LA UNIÓN EUROPEA – NEXTGENERATION EU”, con referencia externa 2023EtL00054, promovido por la Secretaría de Estado de Digitalización e Inteligencia Artificial (SEDIA), cuyos fondos provienen del Ministerio para la Transformación Digital y de la Función Pública, financiado por la Unión Europea-NextGenerationEU».
Key Duties
* Design, develop and maintain secure Virtual Research Environments and Trusted Research Environments to enable compliant analysis of sensitive data in national and European research projects.
* Integrate and evolve existing platforms and tools developed at the Lab ensuring interoperability and alignment with community standards.
* Implement and assess secure data access, transfer and communication mechanisms between Secure Processing Environments and data repositories.
* Translate regulatory and policy requirements (, Data Governance Act, Artificial Intelligence Act) into concrete technical solutions.
* Contribute to European and national projects, including the definition of reference architectures and deployment models, coordination with partners, and preparation of technical deliverables and reports.
* Apply best practices in research software engineering to ensure sustainability, quality and reuse of developed solutions.
Requirements
* Education
o MSc degree in data-driven fields or computer science engineering.
* Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
o Experience in software engineering and DevOps practices in Linux-based environments, including containerisation technologies and automation of software deployment workflows.
o Experience working with CI/CD pipelines and reproducible and maintainable research software practices.
o Hands-on experience with HPC or research computing infrastructures.
o Practical experience in configuring and maintaining reproducible software environments to support research activities.
o Professional working proficiency in English.
* Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
o Experience working in a research or academic computing environment, preferably within large-scale or European research infrastructures.
o Knowledge of cloud and infrastructure-as-code technologies.
o Experience with relational and non-relational databases.
o Familiarity with data analysis and visualisation tools.
o Experience contributing to collaborative projects using issue tracking and project management tools.
o Knowledge of, or interest in, secure data processing environments, sensitive data handling, or regulated research domains (, biomedical research).
* Competences
o Strong problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to design robust technical solutions for complex research environments.
o Ability to work independently while contributing effectively to multidisciplinary teams in an international research setting.
o Capacity to adapt quickly to new technologies, standards and regulatory requirements.
o Good communication skills, including the ability to document technical work and interact with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
o Motivation to contribute to European and national research projects and to support open, sustainable research infrastructures.
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: Open-ended contract due to technical and scientific activities linked to the project and budget duration
* 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: 01/03/2026