Bioinformatics Co-op (Spring 2027)

Wave Life Sciences is a biotechnology company focused on unlocking the broad potential of RNA medicines to transform human health. Our RNA medicines platform, PRISM, combines multiple modalities, chemistry innovation and deep insights in human genetics to deliver scientific breakthroughs that treat both rare and prevalent disorders. Our toolkit of RNA-targeting modalities including RNAi silencing and RNA editing provides us with unmatched capabilities for designing and sustainably delivering candidates that optimally address disease biology. Our diversified pipeline is focused on our obesity, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency and PNPLA3 I148M liver disease programs and includes clinical programs for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Huntington’s disease, as well as several preclinical programs utilizing our versatile RNA medicines platform.  Driven by the calling to “Reimagine Possible”, we are leading the charge toward a world in which human potential is no longer hindered by the burden of disease.

Description: 

Wave needs a highly motivated and detail-orientated individual to work in the areas of bioinformatics, computational biology and human genetics in support of Wave’s drug discovery programs. The candidate will be expected to work within a team to design and execute sequence-based machine learning projects that generate critical information for drug discovery and target assessment. The candidate will create and deploy data and test hypotheses related to human genetics and bioinformatics. The candidate will build and use the next generation of human genetics and bioinformatics tools for the development of oligonucleotide therapeutics. The candidate should have a strong coding and software development background and a willingness to work in an interdisciplinary team of chemists, biologists, and software developers.  

Experience: 

• Discovery and development of oligonucleotide therapeutics is a plus
• Working with high-performance compute environments

Responsibilities:     

• Contribute to large data projects; design and build pipelines that process and analyze related data, store summary results and integrate with the corporate ELN
• Build applications to support bioinformatics and human genetics pipelines in R (shiny) and Python (streamlit)
• Leverage AI-enabled tools, including generative AI and coding assistants, to accelerate software development, data analysis, documentation, and scientific discovery while ensuring appropriate validation, reproducibility, data security, and responsible use.
• Contribute to best practices for Wave’s storage-and-compute scalability of large bioinformatics datasets
• Develop pipelines that determine mapping coordinates and homology of oligonucleotides to genomes and transcriptomes
• Espouse best practices for version control for developed software (Git)

Key Skills:

• Deployment and deployment of interactive application from scripting languages like R and Python (Shiny and streamlit)
• Experience with relational databases; hands on experience with MySQL is a plus.
• Experience in common NGS analyses task such mapping reads, quantification of gene expression, and/or variant calling.
• Experience with common bioinformatics tools like Samtools, GATK, Bowtie, HISAT2, BLAST, htseq-count, DESeq, Salmon, STAR, or Subread 
• Knowledge of Illumina sequencing data analysis is necessary and experience with PacBio and/or Nanopore sequencing is a plus
• Familiarity with UNIX computing environment and proficiency in either Python or R scripting. Experience with docker and Nextflow pipeline is also strongly recommended.
• Ability to communicate finding of NGS data to a general scientific audience in both oral and written forms.

Wave Life Sciences provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, Wave Life Sciences complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Wave Life Sciences expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. Improper interference with the ability of Wave Life Sciences’ employees to perform their job duties may result in discipline up to and including discharge.

We value our relationships with professional recruitment firms. To protect the interests of all parties, and given the large volume of inquiries received from third-party placement agencies, we are not able to respond to all agency inquiries. We do not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than directly from candidates for current or future positions. Submission of unsolicited resumes in advance of a signed agreement between our company and a placement agency does not create an implied obligation and, if an unsolicited candidate represented by a placement agency is hired, we are not obligated to pay a fee. Only approved recruitment firms will be allowed to provide services to Wave Life Sciences USA, Inc.