Senior Scientist - Production

About Us

We are unlocking the potential of our planet’s unexplored biodiversity to build sustainable solutions with our biotechnology partners whilst demonstrating the value of our world’s undiscovered biology.

At Basecamp Research, we pride ourselves on being a diverse, exciting, fun, and flexible place to work. We are a team of biologists, data scientists & explorers united by a sense of adventure and the belief that nature has already designed the solutions to our planet’s greatest challenges - we just have to go out and discover them!

If you feel passionate about the power of biology to show the inherent value of nature and to build a better world, we’d love to hear from you.

About the role

We are looking for ambitious people with a passion for development of sequencing and extraction workflows so we can continuously improve our data generation.

You will have the opportunity to help further build out our DNA / RNA pipelines to build the most diverse database in the world. You’ll be comfortable with sequencing workflows from end to end, from extraction through to library preparation and have expertise with short and long read technologies.

With an extensive background and track record in molecular biology or biochemistry and experience in a high-throughput setting you be an expert in working with DNA / RNA for sequencing applications. For example WGS for deep sequencing both for short and long read methodologies or familiar with techniques for high-throughput shallow sequencing library prep.

Your technical knowledge will allow you to be unfazed by new technologies or paradigm-shifts in sequencing and you’ll help to actively scan for new methods / modalities to help us drive and scale our database growth initiatives. You’ll understand when good is good enough and can support handover for testing and implementation in production. 

The role is laboratory based but you will have ownership over your projects with the opportunity to work closely with our Collaborations team who coordinate sample collection globally and have input to deliver methods collection or extraction, molecular biology methods that are applied to a global network of collaborators and see your work make an impact in real-time.

The role will suit someone with experience but enjoys the technically focused aspects of development from rapid proto-typing to delivery. You’ll also have the opportunity to work with the Data teams who may have specific requirements for particular targeted methods all with the aim to increase our database diversity, data quality and scalability. You’ll be supported by a data first environment to help guide you through development to hand off to production. You’ll know when good is good enough to move in the direction of travel at a fast pace. 

Main responsibilities:

• Working with the Director of Production and Wider RnD organisation - align RnD projects in order and prioritise during data pushes.

• Provide expertise in molecular biology within the organisation in the area of sequencing both DNA and RNA and other techniques such as target enrichment, single cell sequencing or other approaches that could be enlisted for meta-genomic data acquisition. 

• Development of DNA / RNA purification methods using kits / chemistries/ adaptation / in house development to recover viruses / microbes. 

• Comfortable and capable of working within a CLS 2 environment and working with genetically modified organisms and their generation.

• Implementation of current or development of novel methods for library building for Next Generation Sequencing with ownership of the projects. 

• Capable of working with a multi-disciplinary team working both a project lead or a part of a delivery team. 

• Capable of analysing their own experiments and presenting this out to the wider organisation. 

• Be a part of mentorship within the team and wider organisation. 

• Horizon scan for emergent methodologies either within or outside of molecular biology approaches that could add additional value to BaseGraph growth.

• Develop protocols for current and new NGS methods as they come in-play - lead and take charge of RnD projects that fall within this purview. 

• Work collaboratively between other RnD sites and Data science to understand and develop new protocols for challenging target genes / DNA modalities.

Required skills and experiences:

• A minimum of 5 years experience working on technically focused molecular biology and sequencing projects either in a commercial RnD or large project based academic setting for method development, ideally in non-model organisms.

• A track record in delivery of molecular methods for working with DNA and RNA - both for extraction and sequencing in end to and workflows.

• Pro-active and motivated in developing new methods, continuous improvement challenges. 

• Expertise in optimising methods for Nanopore Sequencing / Illumina based sequencing. 

• Experience working within multi-disciplinary teams to deliver projects.

Advantageous skills and experiences:

• Familiarity with automation, pitfalls and development of methods for their usage. 

• Experience with single cell and other targeting methods applications and method developments.

• Familiarity with probe based enrichment strategies or targeted approaches to capture.

• Experience of sequencing analysis methods, informatics.