Senior Software Developer; VDB

Overview

Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) is searching for a Senior Software Developer (VDB) to support National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). This opportunity is full time and onsite at the NCBI in Bethesda, MD.

The Senior Software Developer will work on solutions to support continued development of NCBI’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) – the world premier archive of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data and is part of an international collaboration that includes archives in Europe and Japan. SRA makes biological sequence data derived from NGS available to the research community to enhance reproducibility and allow for new discoveries by analyzing and comparing data sets.

It is a Big Data archive measured in tens of petabytes of stored data. Future development of SRA will make this data more useful for fields such as medical health, public health, microbial diversity and more.

The VDB team is responsible for developing and maintaining the database layer of SRA and a set of client‑side tools that provide access to the SRA data for members of the research community. The current focus of the development effort is on utilizing cloud technologies to achieve higher stability, reliability and performance while keeping storage requirements under control. The team uses C++11 and Python.

The development environment is Linux, gmake/Cmake, with Git Hub for source control and Team City/Jenkins for CI/CD. Some projects are also maintained on Windows (MS Visual Studio, Apache Ant). The team practices an Agile development process involving daily stand‑ups and test‑driven development.

NCBI is part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is the world’s premier biomedical center hosting over six million daily users. It supports a wide range of applications, platforms and environments, including big data, machine learning and multiple clouds, serving more users than almost any other U.S. Government agency.

We attract the best people in the business with a competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, 401(k) plan with employer contribution, paid holidays, vacation, and tuition reimbursement.

• Development, implementation, testing and continued maintenance of the VDB Library, the SRA Toolkit and related projects. Participate in development of “cloud‑ready” tools and pipelines to support sustainable scalability and enable use by collaborators and scientists in the field.
• Learn new technologies, keep up with internal systems, and share knowledge with the team.
• Lead other developers.

• 5+ years of experience and demonstrated proficiency in Object‑Oriented programming using C++.
• Programming experience in a Linux environment.
• Experience with Cloud technologies:
  • AWS: EC2, S3, Lambda
  • GCP: GKE, Google Store, Cloud functions
• Fluency in scripting languages such as bash, perl or python.
• Ability to work with JSON and similar structured document formats.
• Experience with network programming and multi‑threaded programming.
• Experience with SQL and relational databases.
• Experience with open source projects.
• Experience with Agile development methodologies.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, unit tests, integration and regression testing.

• 5+ years of working with genetic and biological data.
• Demonstrated active involvement in open source communities (Git Hub, etc.).
• Experience in multi‑platform development (POSIX, WinAPI).
• Experience with containers (Docker).
• Experience with parsing tools (flex/bison) and design and implementation of domain‑specific languages.