King's College London

About Us

The Bioinformatician/Data Scientist will play a pivotal role in the Breast Cancer Now–funded research programme at King’s College London, supporting the integration of clinical and translational datasets across seven interconnected work packages. The post holder will work under the leadership of Programme Lead, Dr Sheeba Irshad, and in close collaboration with bioinformatics teams at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and King’s College London.

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About The Role

A key responsibility of the role is to design, build, and maintain a clinical research database, drawing together anonymised patient data from clinical trials, electronic health records, and pathology systems. The post holder will harmonise this metadata with high-dimensional experimental datasets generated across the programme — including flow cytometry, spatial transcriptomics, single-cell RNA-seq, spatial proteomics — to support patient stratification, biomarker discovery, and mechanistic modelling of immune resistance.

This is a central, cross-cutting role that offers a unique opportunity to work at the interface of cancer biology, data science, and immunotherapy development, alongside multidisciplinary clinical and research teams

This is a full time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered an a fixed term contract until 31-Jul-2028

Research staff at King’s are entitled to at least 10 days per year (pro-rata) for professional development. This entitlement, from the  Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, applies to Postdocs, Research Assistants, Research and Teaching Technicians, Teaching Fellows and AEP equivalent up to and including grade 7. Visit the  Centre for Research Staff Development for more information.

About You

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. Proven experience building and managing clinical research databases or integrating clinical metadata into research pipelines.
2. Strong skills in statistical analysis, data modelling, and scripting using R and/or Python.
3. Solid understanding of computational biology and biological data standards.
4. Ability to develop and implement custom tools and workflows for the analysis of high-dimensional, multi-modal datasets (e.g. scRNA-seq, CyTOF, spatial transcriptomics).
5. Collaborative mindset with experience working as part of multidisciplinary teams involving clinicians, bioinformaticians, and wet lab researchers.
6. Demonstrated interest in translational cancer research, ideally with a focus on tumour immunology or the tumour microenvironment.
7. Experience managing and analysing complex biological datasets, including both experimental and clinical data sources.
8. Proactive, independent thinker with strong problem-solving skills and the ability to drive forward integrated analyses.

Desirable criteria

1. Familiarity with immunology and/or previous lab experience in cancer or immune profiling studies.
2. Experience working with platforms for monitoring immunological or microenvironmental status (e.g. CyTOF, flow cytometry, spatial biology).
3. Authorship or co-authorship of peer-reviewed publications involving analysis of NGS, single-cell, spatial, or cytometry data.
4. Experience with pipeline scripting, automation, and workflow management in high-performance computing (HPC) environments (e.g. Snakemake, Nextflow, SLURM).
5. Proficiency with software and analytical tools such as R/Bioconductor, UMAP, FlowJo, Cytobank, viSNE, SPADE, or equivalent commercial/open-source solutions.

Downloading a copy of our Job Description 

Full details of the role and the skills, knowledge and experience required can be found in the Job Description document, provided at the bottom of the page. This document will provide information of what criteria will be assessed at each stage of the recruitment process.

Further Information

We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming. We embrace diversity and want everyone to feel that they belong and are connected to others in our community.

We are committed to working with our staff and unions on these and other issues, to continue to support our people and to develop a diverse and inclusive culture at King's.

As part of this commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion and through this appointment process, it is our aim to develop candidate pools that include applicants from all backgrounds and communities.

We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the advert. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘How we Recruit’ pages.