Senior ​/ Lead Geneticist

About Sano

At Sano, we're accelerating the future of precision medicine by connecting patients, healthcare providers, and life sciences companies through a platform designed to improve access to research and clinical trials. Our mission is to ensure that everyone can benefit from advances in genomic medicine, regardless of where they live or the condition they have.

We work with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies worldwide to identify, engage, and support participants for precision medicine programmes, leveraging genetics, technology, and patient-centric design to transform clinical research.

Curious to dive deeper? Read more about what we do here

Brief into to the role, who they are reporting to, ...

• Role
  - Senior / Lead Geneticist

• Salary - 60,000 to 70,000

• Location - UK (remote only)

This role combines bioinformatics, statistical genetics, and clinical genetics to support the delivery of genetic testing programmes from study design through to participant results. The successful candidate will process and quality control genomic data, provide strategic guidance on genetic testing approaches and study feasibility, contribute to bioinformatics pipeline development, and perform advanced statistical and population-genetics analyses where required. They will act as a genetics subject matter expert for internal teams, sponsors, and laboratory partners, ensuring that Sano's genetic analyses, testing strategies, and participant reports are scientifically robust, clinically appropriate, and commercially aligned.

• Performing participant genetic data analysis across active delivery projects in conjunction with other members of the bioinformatics team, including writing and executing Bash, R, Python, and Nextflow scripts to process genotyping array, WES, WGS, Sanger, repeat expansion, and other genetic data types.

  • This work requires a strong understanding of what expected genetic outputs should and should not look like, alongside the genetics knowledge and computational expertise necessary to identify, investigate, and debug issues within bioinformatics pipelines and analysis code where required.

• Working familiarity with standard genomics file formats and tooling (e.g. FASTQ, BAM/CRAM, VCF, PLINK, BED/GTF).

• Quality controlling all incoming genetic data against predefined metrics, running data through QC pipelines, and investigating quality failures or unexpected results.

• Contributing to research-use-only (RUO) pipeline development in conjunction with the bioinformatics team, requiring working familiarity with the languages above alongside Docker and AWS.

• Reviewing generated participant reports prior to release to verify clinical accuracy and output quality, including awareness of the clinical use and downstream reporting of genetic results.

Provide input into Sano's genetic testing strategy and support the team on feasibility and cohorting work. This includes:

• Understanding and identifying which genetic testing approaches are most appropriate for different disease areas, based on the underlying genetics, clinical context, and study objectives.

• Awareness of jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements (e.g. GDPR implications for genetic data.

• Sourcing and evaluating new laboratory and logistics vendors, and identifying new genetic tests available across geographies to expand Sano's service offering.

• Attending client and vendor calls when genetics expertise is required to progress a deal or resolve a technical question.

• Reviewing SOWs and other commercial documentation where genetic scope, methodology, or laboratory requirements are implicated.

• Extracting cohorting numbers from Sano's participant database by querying genetic variant data or phenotypic criteria to support feasibility assessments and proposals.

• Advising on population sizing, stratification criteria, and the genetic-strategy elements of proposals, surfacing statistical risks, assumptions, and dependencies early.

• Deliver advanced statistical and population-genetics analyses on large-scale participant data, if needed.

• Interpreting and communicating genetics results and concepts to internal stakeholders, sponsors, and non-specialist audiences.

• Understand Sano's population-genetics capability, including GWAS and polygenic risk score (PRS) pipeline development, and be able to advise on their design, use, and interpretation.

• Act as the team's expert on statistical study design and methodology for genetic analyses, including advising on power calculations, sample-size estimation, and cohort definition, and guiding correct application of statistical concepts.

• An MSc, PhD, or equivalent experience in genetics, ideally statistical genetics, population genetics, genetic epidemiology, or a related quantitative discipline.

• Proficiency in R and Python (and Bash) for genetic-data…