What are the responsibilities and job description for the Principal Scientist Computational Biology position at Barrington James?
Principal Scientist – Computational Biology | Boston, MA
I’m working with a well-funded, clinical-stage biotech startup developing an innovative cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease, and they’re looking for a senior computational biologist to take ownership of the computational strategy behind the product.
This is a high ownership, build from scratch opportunity. You wouldn’t be joining a large established bioinformatics team with predefined workflows, you’d be coming in as the computational biology owner, working directly with the CTO and helping define how computational biology is done across the company.
What you’ll own:
Genomics & genomic safety
Whole-genome / targeted sequencing
Variant calling and interpretation
Genomic integrity and stability
CNV / structural variant analysis
Transcriptomics & product characterisation
Single-cell RNA-seq
Bulk RNA-seq
Cell population and differentiation characterisation
Understanding changes across the iPSC → therapeutic product journey
Computational infrastructure
Building reproducible, version-controlled pipelines from the ground up
Python and modern software engineering practices
Cloud / HPC infrastructure
Data integration and computational workflows
Applying statistical modelling / machine learning where appropriate
Strategy & ownership:
You’ll be responsible for defining the computational biology roadmap, deciding what needs to be built internally vs externally, establishing analytical standards and helping connect genomic, transcriptomic, process and product data.
You’ll initially be a hands-on individual contributor, but the longer-term vision is to build a computational biology team around you as the function grows.
Requirements:
PhD in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Genomics or a related field
Strong experience working with human genomic data
Depth across areas such as WGS/WES, variant interpretation, CNV/SV, scRNA-seq or bulk RNA-seq
Experience with iPSC/PSC, stem cells or comparable human cell systems
Strong Python / computational skills
Experience building reproducible pipelines and working with cloud/HPC environments
Ideally exposure to cell/gene therapy, regulated genomics or genomic safety
Someone who enjoys operating with significant autonomy and ambiguity
This is a great opportunity for someone who wants to move beyond being one part of an established computational team and instead own the function, define the strategy and eventually build the team around them.