Software Engineer (II)

About DNAstack

At DNAstack our mission is to power precision medicine by building software that breaks down barriers to responsible biomedical data sharing discovery and analysis. We build cutting-edge software and industry standards to help researchers and clinicians analyze sequencing data and make faster more accurate diagnoses. Our platform supports national and international networks tackling rare disease cancer infectious disease and more.

Were a nimble cross-functional team of scientists engineers designers and product thinkers working at the intersection of genomics software and cloud technologies. Our mission is ambitious and so is our team.

The Role

We are looking for an experienced full-stack Software Engineer to join our team on a full-time 12-month contract and help us design and develop products to power breakthrough discoveries in genomics and precision health. We are agile move quickly test and deploy continuously.

You can expect to tackle a variety of challenging problems and design and implement robust secure and scalable systems across multiple cloud environments. You will also have the opportunity to define standards for the future of genomics. We are highly collaborative and a lot of our work happens in partnerships and research consortia. We work with governments public health agencies pharma companies patient advocacy groups diagnostic providers and academic researchers tackling neuroscience oncology and other specialty specific areas. Current work includes building shared analysis infrastructure on DNAstack federated cloud research platform that serve multiple independent disease research consortia simultaneously.

What Youll Do

• Share leadership in the design and development of key systems
• Architect services using well-accepted design patterns to allow for iterative development and future scaling
• Proactively identify architectural and code weaknesses and recommend appropriate solutions
• Prototype develop test and deploy applications
• Work with the product team collaborate with customers partners and peers to identify product requirements
• Perform functional and code reviews contributing to the overall readability and maintainability of code
• Research and select the appropriate tools for new or existing applications with emphasis on efficiency and security
• Create system design and application documentation and maintain resources
• Guide junior members of our team towards strategic goals and technical excellence
• Develop and maintain notebook environments (Python/R) for reproducible cross-dataset bioinformatics analysis
• Build reusable workflow templates for spatial and single-cell integration pipelines intended for public release
• Support federated data access across multi-tenant cloud environments connecting independent disease research consortia on shared infrastructure
  

What Were Looking For

Technologies

Were looking for strong background in at least a subset of the following technologies and interest in learning the rest:

• Java (Spring Boot Lombok JUnit5 Mockito Micrometer Liquibase)
• Python (uv poetry pytest click pandas polars)
• TypeScript (Angular RxJS Chromatic Jasmine Karma)
• Microservices Docker and Kubernetes
• Cloud platforms (AWS GCP Azure)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform CloudFormation)
• Databases and query engines (PostgreSQL BigQuery RedShift Trino)
• Logging Monitoring & Metrics (Datadog Grafana)
• AI-assisted development (Claude Code GitHub Copilot)
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions GitLab CI Concourse blue-green deployments)
• Cloud-native application patterns (12-factor methodology stateless services microservices configuration management secret handling)
• API development (REST OpenAPI Swagger Postman/Insomnia)
• Git (trunk-based development feature branches pull request reviews)
• Shell scripting (Bash Unix automation)
• WDL / Cromwell (workflow orchestration for bioinformatics pipelines)
• GCS-native data access patterns for large genomics file types (BAM h5ad Visium) and distributed processing of sparse matrices
  
  

Qualifications

• 4 years of professional software development experience
• Demonstrable understanding of systems algorithms and software design
• Degree in Computer Science Computer Engineering or related field
• Self-starter attitude willingness to learn new technologies and passion for improving their own coding practices
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Nice to Have

• Experience working with and analyzing big data in a distributed environment
• Experience and aptitude with lean-development principles including:
• Understanding the dangers of over-engineering an MVP
• Not sacrificing solutions for todays problems for concerns about tomorrows
• Familiarity with & respect for principles such as DRY KISS SOLID CUPID YAGNI INVEST Swiss cheese model etc.
• Experience in healthcare or life sciences
• Experience analyzing requirements and communicating solutions especially in collaboration with partners and customers

Why This Role Is Exciting

• Impact at scale: Your work will directly influence tools used by national and international genomics networks.
• Build something new: Shape a core function of the company from a small senior team into a scalable sustainable group.
• Cross-disciplinary collaboration: Work side by side with engineers product managers and scientists to turn bioinformatics into real-world solutions.
• Mission-driven: Contribute to solving rare disease cancer and infectious disease challenges by enabling precision medicine.
• Team culture: Enjoy a flexible remote-friendly team culture along with a competitive salary benefits and employee stock option program.

Where Youll Work

This role offers the flexibility of remote work with the option to work in person from our Toronto office. This arrangement supports your needs and promotes a healthy worklife balance.

Eligibility

To be considered for this position you must be eligible to work in Canada.

Benefits

• Remote friendly with flexible hours and the opportunity to work on-site at our Toronto office
• Comprehensive health benefits: medical dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• Three weeks vacation
• Unlimited sick days
• Maternity and parental leave top-up programs
• One-time remote office set-up stipend
• Career development and learning support
• Opportunity to participate in DNAstacks Employee Stock Option Program
• Opportunity to contribute to open science and global data-sharing efforts

The salary range for this role is $125000 to $175000. At DNAstack we are dedicated to providing pay transparency to all candidates. Compensation at DNAstack is determined through various factors including but not limited to: comparable salary market data within Canada technical skill assessment a holistic view of previous work history and internal pay equity with other DNAstack team members.

DNAstack is committed to fair and equitable compensation accordance with the appropriate legislation in each jurisdiction in which we operate we ensure that our team members are compensated within equal pay ranges for work of equal value regardless of gender.

We regularly review our compensation practices to identify and address any pay equity gaps. Our approach considers skill effort responsibility and working conditions to ensure that compensation decisions are objective transparent and free from bias.

Pay equity is an ongoing process and we are committed to maintaining compliance with legislative requirements while fostering a workplace that values fairness respect and inclusion.

At DNAstack we are committed to building and fostering an inclusive accessible environment for everyone. If you have any questions concerns or requests regarding accessibility needs at any stage of the interview process please contact and we will work with you to meet your needs.

As a small but mighty team we use AI-powered tools to help us stay organized and efficient during our hiring processes. These tools help in areas such as sorting applications and highlighting matches to the role. These tools help us move faster but they definitely dont make decisions for us - every application is reviewed by a real human on our team.

Your privacy matters to us. Any information you share is handled according to Ontario privacy laws as well as our internal privacy practices. If you have any questions about how we use AI in our hiring process please reach out to

Note: this posting is for an existing vacancy that we are seeking to fill.

For compliance reasons all offers of employment at DNAstack are conditional upon a successful background check that may consist of prior employment verification reference checks education confirmation criminal background or other information as permitted by law.

Required Experience:

IC