Phylogeneticist, Software
Berkeley, California /
Active Search /
/ On-site
A Bit About Us:
We are Arcadia Science. Arcadia is a science company founded and led by scientists. Our mission is to transform evolutionary innovations into real-world solutions by openly developing more efficient, replicable, and sustainable ways to leverage the biology of diverse organisms.
The Opportunity:
Within Arcadia’s new scientific framework, we have two general buckets: dynamic projects and a centralized platform. Projects are fluid efforts that allow us to ask key biological questions. Our platform leverages broad-scale evolutionary comparisons across diverse species and tool development, which together help us make better hypotheses and test them more efficiently. While the platform shapes projects, projects provide critical test cases for refining the platform.
For this role, we are seeking a computational biologist with a background in evolutionary biology for our software team. The role is to creatively engage with and empower project scientists across multiple disciplines, leveraging the candidate’s evolutionary expertise to guide and improve nascent research projects. This position will contribute to numerous research efforts and on a rapid time scale, including generating hypotheses, conducting genomic/phylogenomic analyses, and performing literature reviews and dataset curations.
Top candidates will have extensive methodological and practical experience with the application of genomic and phylogenomic analyses with an emphasis on software engineering practices. Additionally, top candidates will have fluency in multiple coding languages (e.g. R, bash, Python), and will easily adapt to conducting analyses on different computational infrastructures such as AWS cloud computing. You can learn more about our approach to computing at Arcadia here and check our existing projects on GitHub.
The Phylogeneticist, Software will be responsible for:
- Interfacing with project scientists at Arcadia, both with and without formal training in evolutionary biology or bioinformatics, to encourage, enable and support comparative evolutionary thinking at the early stages of research development.
- Curating and analyzing evolutionary comparative datasets (molecular, phenotypic, ecological, etc) spanning multiple taxonomic scales, from eukaryotes to prokaryotes.
- Creating novel tools or pipelines for the rapid deployment of phylogenomic comparative analyses for both hypothesis testing and generation.
Education/Experience:
- Ph.D. or equivalent in biology with background in evolution, phylogenetics, and computational biology/genomics.
- Experience with basic software engineering practices (using version control, CI/CD pipelines etc.)
- Experience with a workflow orchestration framework (Nextflow, Snakemake etc.)
- Experience with environment management or containerization tools (Conda, Docker etc.)
- Ability to quickly and independently design, perform, and summarize comparative, phylogenetic analyses
- Is highly adaptable and able to start and stop various projects as well as pivot with the organization as it grows
- Has a commitment to sharing scientific processes and results openly and in a timely manner
- Nice to have: Cross-disciplinary project and people management experience
- Nice to have: Interest in leveling up the organization computationally and teaching experience (ie Carpentries)
Successful applicants can expect to be compensated between $125K-150K with benefits and a highly competitive equity offering, depending on experience level. The position will require the individual to be on-site at our Berkeley, California headquarters.
Application Process:
Interested applicants should send a resume and a one-page cover letter that addresses their interest and qualifications for the position. Please include 1-3 links to open source repositories you have created or contribute to.
Arcadia Science is an equal opportunity workplace; we welcome people from all backgrounds and communities. We provide competitive compensation and practical benefits to keep you happy and healthy so that you can do your best work.
Please note that an offer of employment from Arcadia is contingent upon the successful clearance of a reference and background check.
