Senior Engineer/Bioinformatician

High-throughput sequencing technologies are increasingly enabling precision medicine in healthcare. The Department of Medical Genetics at Oslo University Hospital is Norway’s largest medical genetics department with 250 employees and state-of-the-art sequencing equipment dedicated to providing clinical grade analyses for patients suffering from severe genetic and hereditary diseases.

We are a multi-disciplinary team of bioinformaticians and developers within Unit for Genome Diagnostics who run operations, develop analysis pipelines and software for genomics. Handling more than 12,000 short-read whole genomes per year, we operate at a scale that demands robust pipelines and automation, system scalability, and high operational availability. Some of our ongoing work include automating our current workflows based on our novel in-house library Maestro, and integrating orders and data management with our new LIMS system. We develop ELLA, an advanced open-source web-based application which streamlines the process of identifying disease-causing genetic variants, and we continue to innovate in a very rapidly developing field of medicine.

We are seeking candidates for one permanent position as bioinformatician (Senior Engineer) and one long-term substitute bioinformatician (Specialist Engineer) to support our operations and development. The leave substitute position is expected to cover the full duration of the original employee’s leave, ending June 1st 2028, with the possibility of extension depending on circumstances.

Responsibilities

• Develop, refine and adapt open-source bioinformatic pipelines for short- and long-read DNA and RNA sequencing.
• Build modular workflows and manage metadata with our Maestro automation system.
• Maintain and enhance reference datasets, variant databases, and container-based deployments to ensure analysis accuracy and reproducibility
• Optimize pipeline performance across CPU/GPU compute resources and various storage architectures.
• Participate in operations, including documentation, production monitoring and incident handling.
• Contribute to development and validation testing of in-house and third-party tools for variant annotation and interpretation.
• Support integration with LIMS and other systems for variant interpretation and data sharing.
  

Required qualifications (both positions)

• Master’s degree or equivalent in bioinformatics, informatics, or other relevant discipline.
• Experience with developing and operating bioinformatic pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with sequencing data analysis and common data formats (BAM, VCF, BED, etc).
• Proficiency with Linux/CLI and skills in scripting languages (e.g. Bash, Python).
• Experience with version control tools and CI platforms (e.g. Gitlab, Github).
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal. Fluency in Norwegian is highly beneficial.

Additional requirements (Senior Engineer position)

• PhD or extensive experience in bioinformatics, informatics, or other relevant discipline.
• Experience with workflow management frameworks (e.g. Nextflow).
• Familiarity with container technologies and cloud-based analysis workflows.
• Experience with databases and large-scale genomic data management.
• Knowledge of clinical genomics standards and quality management.

Documentation of education/experience as well as certificates must be attached to the application, which is submitted via webcruiter by clicking on the link "apply for the position".

Personal Qualities

• Enthusiasm, drive, and initiative for continuous improvement.
• Enjoyment of teamwork and knowledge sharing within inter-disciplinary teams.
• Ability to understand complex issues, see the bigger picture, and contribute to defining and pursuing shared goals and priorities.
• A conscientious and thorough attention to details and quality.
• Proactive approach to staying current with genetics, sequencing and biological data management.

What We Offer

• A safe and supportive workplace with an important societal mission.
• A workplace characterized by trust, openness, and respect.
• Opportunity to have an impact on genomic medicine in Norwegian healthcare.
• Work within a highly experienced and professional multi-disciplinary team of developers and bioinformaticians.
• Contribute to open-source tools used in healthcare and in national genomics infrastructure.
• Varied tasks with autonomy based on your expertise.

We maintain a high level of physical presence in our open-plan office at Ullevål, with some flexibility in working hours and the possibility of limited remote work. In January 2027 we will move to join an even larger bioinformatic community with other departments and UiO in the new Life Science Building. For more background information and details about the team, see about.ousamg.io, ous-research.no/digigen, gitlab.com/dpipe, and gitlab.com/alleles. Please contact the bioinformatics group coordinator Tony Håndstad at tony.handstad@medisin.uio.no or unit manager Yngve Sejersted at yngsej@ous-hf.no for any questions. Note that the full suitability of a candidate will be given consideration in the selection and interview process.

Oslo University Hospital is a workplace with great diversity. We believe this is crucial for solving our tasks in the best possible way. We want this diversity to be reflected among the applicants for our positions, and we encourage all qualified candidates, regardless of background, to apply!

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