As a bioinformatician, you will give support to researchers in each of the four NIOO-KNAW research departments. Projects are very diverse, ranging from bacteria and fungi to plants, insects, birds and genetic material recovered directly from soil or other environmental samples. Your task is to interact with researchers, ICT staff and data stewards to facilitate researchers in performing their bioinformatics analyses, both for sequencing-based and other data-rich research. This includes tutoring, helping with data management, building pipelines, providing training, and advising researchers. You will not do research yourself.

Your role:
You will be part of a team with another bioinformatician to give support and advice to researchers during the complete research cycle, develop and give (carpentry) workshops, teaching coding and data science skills to researchers, develop and contribute to existing open-source workflows and learn others how to use them, develop infrastructure consisting of several Linux servers available to researchers, and act as a knowledge hub within the institute by providing documentation and training material.

We expect you to have an academic background, excellent communication skills, well in English, experience with high-throughput sequencing data, a strong motivation and social skills, and a good network of contacts in the bioinformatics community. We are looking for enthusiasm about educating, facilitating and supporting researchers. The position is part of a small, dedicated team that coordinates all aspects of bioinformatics support.

Your profile:

• An all-round bioinformatician with expertise or proven interest in multi-omics data analysis (e.g. transcriptomics, epigenomics, metabolomics) preferably with an environmental or ecological focus
• Minimally an MSc degree in bioinformatics or a related field
• Experienced in working in a UNIX environment and bash
• Affinity with system administration tasks in general and specific for HPC systems
• Good programming skills, preferably Python and R
• Can create workflows with Snakemake or has experience with similar workflow management systems like Nextflow
• Like to keep things organized and motivate others with version control systems
• Know how to install and use scientific software either via conda, easybuild or (docker/singularity) containers thereby encouraging re-usability
• Work in a reproducible way, bringing into practice the FAIR principles and motivate others to do so
• Affinity with data management and stewardship
• Motivated to learn new technologies and skills and transfer these to others

The appointment will initially be for one year with the possibility for extension and is 30,4-38 hours per week (0,8-1,0 FTE). Salary depends on training and work experience. The maximum gross monthly salary coming with a full-time appointment is €4.402,00 (scale 10 of the Collective Agreement for Dutch Universities), excluding 8% holiday pay and a year-end bonus. We offer an extensive package of fringe benefits.

Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO)

The Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) is an Academy research institute. It conducts ecological research on land, in the ocean and in fresh water and studies how living organisms interact with one another and their environment. NIOO stimulates biodiversity and sustainability in nature and society through its worldwide network of researchers, policymakers, conservationists and other stakeholders.