Senior/Lead Bioinformatics Scientist (Multi-Cancer Early Detection)

Natera’s Research team is building tests that can detect many cancers from a single blood draw. We are looking for a Senior or Lead Bioinformatics Scientist to join the team building the technology at the heart of that effort. You will work with large-scale, multi-modal genomic datasets from clinical cohorts and partner closely with molecular biologists and clinical scientists. You will help advance the state-of-the-art and drive new methods from prototype, through scalable implementation, toward clinical validation and, ultimately, to patients.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Develop and validate new algorithms to analyze large multimodal epigenomic datasets
• Drive research analyses through implementation, testing and performance evaluation, including developing new features within existing pipelines
• Work with sequencing and clinical data from large cohorts, ensuring data integrity and quality control
• Partner with molecular biologists and clinical scientists to solve challenging, open-ended problems
• Visualize results and present complex findings to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Contribute to the team’s standards for code quality and reproducibility

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, Computer Science, Biology, or a related field; alternatively a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree with at least 4 years of professional experience
• Track record developing and validating analysis workflows for high-throughput sequencing data
• Experience applying and evaluating statistical and ML methods to large datasets
• Strong quantitative reasoning and data analysis skills, applied effectively to real scientific problems.
• Software development experience, including proficiency in Python and its scientific computing ecosystem
• Fluent using Linux command-line tools and cloud computing environments
• Strong verbal and written communication skills

Preferred Experience

• Working knowledge of DNA methylation and other epigenomic data
• Experience with cell-free DNA and liquid biopsy samples
• Background in cancer genomics or diagnostics
• Experience working with data and metadata from large clinical cohorts
• Familiarity using AI tools for complex scientific tasks and with foundation models applied to biological data