FlowDeploy builds dev tools for bioinformatics, and we're looking for a product-minded software engineer and a bioinformatics engineer. I think a former or future founder would do well in this role.
Curiosity matters more than domain-specific experience in bioinformatics, although some bioinformatics context is helpful: understanding if what you've built solves a problem requires talking to users and understanding them.
You would be working in a few key areas of our product:
- Improving our integration with bioinformatics pipelining languages like Nextflow and Snakemake.
- Building our core API. This is currently written with Express/Node.js with a Postgres database.
- Building the UI for launching, monitoring, and sharing bioinformatics pipelines and data. This is currently written in React with Typescript.
- Improving our pipeline execution. This is mostly in AWS Batch.
- Improving our data handling. Most raw data is stored in S3, with metadata in a Postgres database.
We're a very small team, and we plan to stay small until we have strong product-market fit. We're funded by Y Combinator, have revenue from the FlowDeploy product, and can keep going for years without raising additional funding.
This is super cool! It's nice to see commercialization in the bioinfo space, after dealing with bedraggled servers running in your PI's lab for many years and dealing with insane packages (ever try to install QIIME?). I would have loved this job coming out of college.
Thanks! Ironically, I was hired for my first job in bioinformatics by one of the QIIME authors. Unfortunately, that didn't make it any easier.
I don't think anyone has really figured out commercialization in the space yet – us included. The community is still rooted strongly in academia, so commercializing requires a delicate balance between profitability and openness.
I imagine it's what building dev tools was like a couple decades ago. It's fun to see the field grow and evolve.
Certainly, and as I was having my swan song of a semester, it really did seem like things were turning a great corner on reproducibility, distribution of data, sharing code, building code that wasn't matlab scripts cobbled together and so forth.
QIIME is awesome, they have taken on the unenviable task of "dealing with" all those random sub libraries that are from hell.
If you're familiar with Galaxy[0], we used that back in the day and wrote plugins at my lab so we could have researchers use the tools we were building. it feels like that type of 'platform of data + programs" would be easier to monetize. I mean, the workloads are there, people like plug and play, it could use a lot of sprucing up and some paid people to solve the nasty parts.
And yes, I think it's a rite of passage - I mean your own FASTA counter, of course! [1] ;)
This pattern is common. Anecdotally, I think the majority of people trained in bioinformatics end up working full-time in standard software engineering.
I think this is starting to change. Next-generation sequencers and other imaging devices are causing more wet labs to produce massive amounts of data – which is increasing the number of companies hiring for bioinformatics roles.
Yup, ain't that just how it goes. I'll probably make the leap soon myself sometime this year, and I'm not looking forward to playing "skill-tetris" with recruiters.
I wouldn't worry. Research really sets apart new grads. Everyone else got a degree too, but doing cool research is usually a good conversation starter during interviews!
FlowDeploy builds dev tools for bioinformatics, and we're looking for a product-minded software engineer and a bioinformatics engineer. I think a former or future founder would do well in this role.
Curiosity matters more than domain-specific experience in bioinformatics, although some bioinformatics context is helpful: understanding if what you've built solves a problem requires talking to users and understanding them.
You would be working in a few key areas of our product:
- Improving our integration with bioinformatics pipelining languages like Nextflow and Snakemake.
- Building our core API. This is currently written with Express/Node.js with a Postgres database.
- Building the UI for launching, monitoring, and sharing bioinformatics pipelines and data. This is currently written in React with Typescript.
- Improving our pipeline execution. This is mostly in AWS Batch.
- Improving our data handling. Most raw data is stored in S3, with metadata in a Postgres database.
We're a very small team, and we plan to stay small until we have strong product-market fit. We're funded by Y Combinator, have revenue from the FlowDeploy product, and can keep going for years without raising additional funding.
Interested? Apply through YC's Work at a Startup:
- Product Engineer: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flowdeploy/jobs/KrwNpl...
- Bioinformatics Engineer: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flowdeploy/jobs/I9F9sI...
You can reach me directly at "noah" at this domain.