Principal Scientist Computational Biology

Principal Scientist – Computational Biology | Boston, MA

I’m working with a well-funded, clinical-stage biotech startup developing an innovative cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease, and they’re looking for a senior computational biologist to take ownership of the computational strategy behind the product.

This is a high ownership, build from scratch opportunity. You wouldn’t be joining a large established bioinformatics team with predefined workflows, you’d be coming in as the computational biology owner, working directly with the CTO and helping define how computational biology is done across the company.

• Whole-genome / targeted sequencing
• Variant calling and interpretation
• Genomic integrity and stability
• CNV / structural variant analysis

• Single-cell RNA-seq
• Bulk RNA-seq
• Cell population and differentiation characterisation
• Understanding changes across the iPSC → therapeutic product journey

• Building reproducible, version-controlled pipelines from the ground up
• Python and modern software engineering practices
• Data integration and computational workflows
• Applying statistical modelling / machine learning where appropriate

You’ll be responsible for defining the computational biology roadmap, deciding what needs to be built internally vs externally, establishing analytical standards and helping connect genomic, transcriptomic, process and product data.

You’ll initially be a hands-on individual contributor, but the longer-term vision is to build a computational biology team around you as the function grows.

• PhD in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Genomics or a related field
• Strong experience working with human genomic data
• Depth across areas such as WGS/WES, variant interpretation, CNV/SV, scRNA-seq or bulk RNA-seq
• Experience with iPSC/PSC, stem cells or comparable human cell systems
• Strong Python / computational skills
• Experience building reproducible pipelines and working with cloud/HPC environments
• Ideally exposure to cell/gene therapy, regulated genomics or genomic safety
• Someone who enjoys operating with significant autonomy and ambiguity

This is a great opportunity for someone who wants to move beyond being one part of an established computational team and instead own the function, define the strategy and eventually build the team around them.