Software Developer / Bioinformatician(ID2978)

At the Animal and Plant Health Agency, we safeguard animal and plant health for the benefit of people, the environment and the economy. The Central Unit for Sequencing and PCR (CUSP) is an interdisciplinary group within the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) that provides key laboratory services for the detection and genetic characterisation of infectious disease in animals and plants across Great Britain. In collaboration with other departments, CUSP's outputs are utilised in surveillance programmes that investigate transmission and respond to emerging outbreaks. The main team is based at the APHA site in Weybridge, but the role could be based anywhere in GB, with travel to Weybridge when required. This role within CUSP is to provide programming and bioinformatics expertise to develop automated data analysis and visualisation tools, so requires an end-to-end understanding of data flows within our group though to multiple end-users. You will need to understand how our data is generated by the lab and then how it is aggregated, processed and reported. This will be pivotal in enabling us to improve infrastructure, expand delivery of APHA's bioinformatics pipelines, and build cutting-edge surveillance applications. The job will:

• Work within a team to develop software solutions that process, report and visualise outputs from the sequencing laboratory.
• Streamline and automate data flows between laboratory instrumentation, cloud compute resources, and corporate IT systems.
• Write high quality code managed by version control and automated tests.
• Support research on methodologies for analysis of genome sequence data.
• Strengthen APHA's bioinformatics and surveillance applications in collaborative cross-departmental teams.
• Communicate with research scientists, epidemiologists, and veterinarians to understand the problems, plan solutions, and drive development forward.
Liaise with external organisations (e.g., collaborating institutes, Public Sector Establishments and Universities) to develop common solutions.