Bioinformatician (Microbiome & Genomics) — Genics, Brisbane

Genics is looking for a Bioinformatician to own the analytical pipelines behind our commercial microbiome services. We're an Australian biotech company working in early pathogen detection, biosecurity and genetic breeding for aquaculture and agriculture, with customers in more than 45 countries. We run our sequencing in-house, and our microbiome pipelines are already delivering commercial results. The chance is to take ownership of them and grow them into a broader analytical platform.

What you'll own

- The production microbiome and DNA-barcoding pipelines, starting with our Oxford Nanopore full-length 16S workflow, run and read QC, taxonomic classification, alpha- and beta-diversity and community analysis, and validation against reference standards.
- Extending the platform to ITS and other barcoding workflows, weighing ASV, OTU and alignment-based approaches against platform error profiles and intended use.
- The validation discipline, mock communities, controls, documented acceptance criteria, versioned reference databases.
- The analytical design of how results reach customers: automated reporting, dashboards, and a longitudinal searchable database. You define what's reported and how it's calculated, acting as the interface between the science and the software team who build the platform.

- Keeping it reproducible, version control, parameterised workflows and documented runbooks.

Where it grows As our sequencing capability expands, the role extends into whole-genome analysis for non-model plant and animal species, variant calling, SNP discovery, panel design and into microbial genomics and pathogen investigation.

What we're looking for





- Tertiary qualification in bioinformatics, computational biology, genomics, microbiology or a related quantitative life-science discipline.
- Three or more years' applied bioinformatics experience. Academic research counts.
- Demonstrated experience with marker-gene or amplicon sequence analysis, from raw reads through quality control and taxonomic classification to an interpreted result. 16S rRNA is expected, but experience with ITS, COI or other barcoding markers demonstrates the same capability.
- Python fluency, R for statistics and visualisation, confident on Linux, comfortable in cloud (AWS).
- Applied statistics for community and comparative analysis, and the judgement to tell a real difference from an artefact of the method.
- A practical understanding of how extraction, library prep and sequencing QC shape your data, and the ability to work with lab scientists on it.

Nice to have: Oxford Nanopore, QIIME2/DADA2, VSEARCH or mothur, PICRUSt2 or similar functional inference, ITS, Nextflow or Snakemake, SQL, non-model variant calling or SNP panel design, aquaculture or agriculture domain experience. You won't have all of these. Location: Brisbane-based, onsite, full time. Must have current legal working rights in Australia.

How to Apply: Email [email protected] with a cover letter addressing the criteria, your CV, and two referee contacts. In the cover letter, tell us about a pipeline or analysis you've built or substantially extended: which markers, pipelines, classifiers and reference databases you used and why, how you validated the result, and what you'd do differently. If you'd like the full position description before applying, just ask at the same address.

📌 Bioinformatician (Microbiome & Genomics) (Brisbane)
🏢 Genics
📍 Brisbane