Title : Senior Consultant - Bioinformatician

 GCL: D1

Company

AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical business that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialisation of prescription medicines for some of the world's most serious diseases. At AstraZeneca, we are proud to have an unusual workplace culture that encourages innovation and collaboration. We want you to express your diverse perspectives, contributing to an energized environment and providing creative ideas.

Department – Data & Analytics, S&EUIT

Data & Analytics provides analytics and data insight services and solutions critical to the Data & AI/ML emerging strategy and mission of Science & Enabling Unit IT (S&EUIT) and AZ. D&A is organized into teams specializing in Information Architecture, Data Engineering, Data Visualisation, Knowledge Management, Data Science, Data Analysis and Information Governance. 

About the Role

Are you interested in being involved in a process that could benefit millions of patients? We want a bioinformatics scientist who engages in the most challenging informatics problems in the drug discovery clinical trial phase.

Be part of a close-knit and technical team of informaticians, data scientists, machine learning and knowledge engineers, delivering data workflows and informatics solutions which will advance the standard of healthcare. Our work will be applied to the full early science drug discovery projects that involve data processing, downstream analysis and algorithm development that would provide scientific insights. We work with IT, other informatics professionals and scientists from all disciplines in direct support of AstraZeneca drug discovery projects. We seek to improve the quality of candidate drugs delivered by the Genomics research projects across AstraZeneca!

The ideal applicant will possess a blend of skills - genomics, bio informatics, programming and data science. The team is involved directly in data wrangling, data analysis and problem solving with and on behalf of project teams and individuals. The applicant will run pipelines that produce quantified variants / expression values from raw sequencing data. These pipelines utilize High Performance Computing heavily as the processing is very computationally demanding. The sensitivity, speed and reduced cost per sample make it a highly attractive platform compared to other sequencing modalities. The overall impact of this project is expected to be high as the disease areas expect fast turnaround times for processing their Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data. The data is subsequently used to support publications, CDID and other immediate needs. The applicant will experience Global R&D gaining strong understanding of the data involved in clinical trials and analysis. The applicant will utilize communication, problem solving and critical thinking skills through understanding the needs to Scientists/ other BioInformaticians and provide solutions to fulfil these needs. Through this work, the applicant would be contributing to such an extent that it has a deep and direct impact on patient care.

The ability to present complex problems, from the IT and science disciplines, in a simple and concise manner to understand implications and help bring insight is essential.

We will encourage you to work both as an individual contributor and with the wider team in delivering high quality outputs and support to the projects! Maintaining an up-to-date knowledge of the field and ongoing developments in wider data science will be essential to fulfilling the role.

Key Responsibilities

●       Work closely within the team and with scientific colleagues across AstraZeneca genomics units to ensure informatics and advanced analytics solutions meet the ongoing needs of all scientists.

●       Develop informatics solutions, e.g., using pipelining approaches, scripting and algorithm development.

●       Contribute to Genomics drug projects with downstream analysis and data analytics.

●       Understand and seek opportunities to apply artificial intelligence & machine learning to the world of biology informatics.

●       Research external peers, academics and software providers to apply the latest methods to relevant business problems.

●       Work closely with data scientists, machine learning, engineering and platform teams to utilize the latest algorithms to deliver scientific insights to drug project teams.

●       Work with informatics colleagues in our Global Technology Centre (GTC) in Chennai to deliver high quality informatics solutions.

●       Promote AstraZeneca’s informatics and data science reputation through external publications and presentations.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

●       Masters/PhD in biological sciences, biological engineering, bioinformatics or a pharmaceutical scientific discipline or similar field, with a demonstrable record of informatics delivery in a pharmaceutical/biotech setting.

●       Strong coding and software engineering skills such as Python, R, Scripting.

●       Experience working with relevant tools and databases such as NCBI, PubMED, UCSC genome databrowswer, bedtools, samtools, Picard and visualization tools such as Spotfire.

●       Experience working with high performance clusters such as HPC or SCP.

●       Knowledge of cloud environment and related technologies.

●       Excellent communication skills and facilitation skills, ability to work with others to achieve objectives.

●       Ability to explain complex methods and techniques to a non-technical audience.

●       Good communication, written and verbal skills, proficient English.

In addition, we expect the candidate to:

●       Exhibit influencing and innovation skills

Other

The role will have no direct line reports, but task management responsibilities within project or services may occur

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. 

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.