Software Developer – Biology

About the role

Helical is building in‑silico labs for biology, enabling pharma and biotech teams to run millions of virtual experiments quickly. We are looking for a Software Developer with a strong background in computational biology or bioinformatics to join our core product development team and help bring novel bio foundation models into production.

Key responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable pipelines for biological data processing and analysis.
• Integrate and optimise Bio Foundation Models for production use, collaborating with ML researchers.
• Develop tools and services for data visualisation, annotation, and quality control of biological datasets.
• Collaborate with AI infrastructure and software engineers to improve workflow reliability and scalability.
• Contribute to the architecture and implementation of backend services and APIs supporting biological workflows.

Required profile

• MSc or PhD in Biology, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics or a related life‑sciences field.
• 2+ years of professional software development experience with production‑grade code.
• Hands‑on experience with single‑cell analysis tools such as AnnData, scanpy, scib, scipy.
• Ability to assess model predictions for biological relevance and understand experimental design.
• Comfortable working with large biological datasets and common file formats (h5ad, csv, parquet).

Required skills

• Python (production‑grade, package structure, debugging).
• Git workflows and collaborative development practices.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Docker and containerised development environments.
• CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment workflows.
• Testing frameworks such as pytest and test‑driven development.
• Familiarity with bio foundation models (e.g., scGPT, Geneformer, scVI).

What we offer

• Proven product already used by top pharma companies.
• Opportunity to shape a category‑defining company at an inflection point.
• High ownership, direct impact, and close collaboration with founders.
• Competitive salary, equity and benefits.