We have two new open positions in the group. We are looking for a bioinformatics analyst and a scientific software engineer to join the teams that develop the HMMER and Infernalsoftware packages for biological sequence analysis. The teams are growing, with a key new team member Nick Carter, who joined us from high performance computing research at Intel and a previous computer science faculty position at U Illinois. We're aiming in particular to bring out the next release of HMMER, the long-fabled HMMER4. These positions offer the short-term opportunity to help us bring these existing projects to the next level, and a longer-term opportunity to participate in a variety of fundamental computational biology algorithms research and software development.
The scientific software engineer will work most closely with Nick and myself on HMMER, and later on Infernal in collaboration with Eric Nawrocki (NIH/NCBI). Our codebases are ANSI C99, we take advantage of SIMD vectorization instructions on multiple platforms, and we're working hard on parallelization efficiency with multithreading (POSIX threads) and message passing (MPI), so we're looking for someone with expertise in these technologies. We currently work primarily on Apple OS/X and Linux platforms ourselves, but our code has to build and work on any POSIX-compliant platform, so we're also looking to expand our automated build/test procedures. Our codebases are open source and we work with standard open source tools such as git, autoconf, and GNU make, and development is distributed amongst a small group of people throughout the world, especially including collaborators at NIH NCBI, U Montana, HHMI Janelia Farm, and Cambridge UK; you can see our github repos here. The official advertisement for the position is online here, with instructions on how to apply.
The bioinformatics analyst will work most closely with our bioinformatics secret agent man Tom Jones, Nick, and myself. We're looking for someone to bridge the gap between the computational engineering and the biological applications, someone who will have one hand in the development team (working on how our command line interfaces work, and how our output formats come out), and another hand on our collaborations within Harvard and with the outside world using and testing our software on real problems. We want someone thinking about benchmarking and testing, with expertise in a scripting language (Python, Perl); we want someone working on user-oriented documentation and tutorials (Jekyll, Markdown); we want someone thinking about ease and elegance of use; we want someone working on how our tools play well with others, including Galaxy and BioConductor, and liasing between us and the various package managers who bundle our software (such as Homebrew, MacPorts, all the various Linuxen). The official ad and instructions to apply are online here.
We are reading applications now, and will accept applications in a rolling fashion for at least another month or so; beyond that depends on how our candidate pool looks. The positions are available immediately. Our funding for them has just activated, supported by the NIH NHGRI under the NIH's program (PA-14-156) for Extended Development, Hardening and Dissemination of Technologies in Biomedical Computing, Informatics, and Big Data Science; we gratefully acknowledge this new support, as I've rejoined the NIH community after ten years away at a monastery.