Scientific Developer (Chemical Biology Resources) – EMBL-EBI, Hinxton

Job Description

We are looking for a highly motivated Scientific Developer to join the Chemical Biology Resources team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), located on the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge, UK. This is a 13-month fixed-term position offered as maternity cover.
The Chemical Biology Resources team provides world-leading chemogenomics resources to the scientific community. ChEMBL is a database of quantitative small-molecule bioactivity data curated primarily from the scientific literature widely used to support drug discovery projects in industry and academia. SureChEMBL is a complementary patent resource containing chemical structures extracted from patents daily. UniChem links chemical structures across databases. ChEBI is a highly curated database and ontology of compounds of biological interest. OPSIN converts systematic chemical names into chemical structures.
The EBI is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and it is a world-leading bioinformatics centre providing biological data to the scientific community with expertise in data storage, analysis and representation. EMBL-EBI provides freely available data from life science experiments, performs basic research in computational biology and offers an extensive user training programme, supporting researchers in academic and industry.
Your role
You will develop and maintain software infrastructure to ensure robust, reliable, and automated ChEMBL data releases through streamlined build, packaging, testing, and deployment processes, while also assisting in the development and maintenance of other services supported by the team. You will be working closely with our team which consists of an international and interdisciplinary mix of professional scientists and software engineers.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain the scientific workflows underpinning the curation, integration and dissemination of the group’s resources (e.g. the data pipelines for generating ChEMBL releases which are a mixture of Python and Java). 
• Develop new innovative solutions for enhancing scientific data workflows and support our mission to disseminate scientific information publicly
• Manage and enhance scientific software tools essential for processing and storing chemical and biological data across the team’s services, ensuring adherence to software development best practices.
• Collaborate with the ChEMBL, SureChEMBL and ChEBI teams to identify and resolve data inconsistencies and quality issues.
• Work cross-functionally to integrate computational methodologies into data curation and analysis workflows, including the incorporation of external chemical and bioactivity databases (e.g., BindingDB, PubChem) into the ChEMBL ecosystem.
• Support database management, including the maintenance and administration of database instances.
• Document workflows and processes to improve maintainability, efficiency, and reproducibility.
• Participate in cross functional project meeting with partners on campus (such as Open Targets) and external stakeholders
• Contribute to training activities, and participate in scientific meetings

Qualifications

• A PhD or equivalent experience in Chemistry, Computer Science, Bioinformatics, Data Science, or a related field.
• Experience in cheminformatics or data engineering applied to life sciences
• Proficiency in Python, with experience in cheminformatics libraries and topics (such as RDKit, Open Babel, InChI, SMILES/SMARTS)
• Experience working with relational (SQL) databases
• Familiarity working in a structured collaborative data and software development environment (git, GitHub/GitLab)
• Proficient in working with Linux operating systems.
• Self-motivated with good communication skills and the ambition to work with international collaborators and users. 
• Can-do attitude and willingness to help solve problems
• Advanced English language and excellent interpersonal skills

Skills Required

• You might have:
• Familiarity with containerization technologies (Docker)
• Basic understanding of Java, with a willingness to develop expertise and contribute to Java-based pipelines as needed
• Experience in using AI-based methods, such as NLP, LLM for efficient data processing

Additional Information

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