Omics jobs and careers

A career within the -omics space exposes you to an array of amazing opportunities, with the broad nature of the field there is opportunity to specialise within a particular niche or keep more generalise. -Omics data has a vast array of applications with disease research space used as both a marker of disease and to identify pathway involved in disease for potential therapeutic targets. Some disease research areas using -omics data, and therefore hiring -omics professionals include; immunology, oncology, Neurology, plant science, rare diseases and more.

As an -omics scientists you will likely be using either a combination of wet lab and data analysis, or just analysis side to produce invaluable data used to improve human health, revolutionise crop growth, improve medication efficacy or countless other application.

Bioinformatician
Biostatistician
Chemometrician
Computational Biologist
Proteomic Scientists
Omics Assay Developer
Biomarker Scientist
Scientist (multi-omics)

Junior Bioinformatician
Bioinformatician
Senior Bioinformatician
Principal Bioinformatician
Head of Bioinformatics
Director

Salaries are dependent on company, company location and exact areas of responsibility of each role. Generally, roles based in Cambridge, London and Oxford will be higher paying than anywhere else in the UK as these are the hubs for science with many companies competing for top talent.  There is also variation depending on if the role is remote or office based. Below are the rough benchmarks:

Junior Bioinformatician – Usually someone who has a master’s degree in computational biology, bioinformatics or other relevant field. It would help here to have some industry or project experience. Salaries for these roles range from £25,000 – £40,000.

Bioinformatician– Usually someone who has a master’s and a couple of years’ experience, or someone who has done a PhD and is looking to go straight into industry. The salary guide for this is between £35,000 – £50,000.

Senior Bioinformatician – Usually someone has a PhD and relevant experience within the industry or significant postdoc experience, or someone who has a master’s with about 5 years’ experience in industry. Salaries for these roles tend to be between £50,000 and £70,000.

Principal Bioinformatician – This will be someone with real expertise in the area that are working on, with significant industry experience and nearly always a PhD. They will also have experience managing people and projects. Salaries for this kind of role could be between £60,000 – £90,000.

Head of Bioinformatics – Salaries for senior posts of this kind tend to sit between £80,000-£100,000.

The skills within omics roles vary depending on the precise job but some examples of what may be included are below:

• Analysis of high throughput sequencing data and/or applied statistics.
• A high level of scientific language use (Python, R, etc.).
• Mass Spec expertise.
• Experience developing and managing large databases.
• Expertise in establishing and maintaining bioinformatics pipelines in workflow solutions such as NextFlow, Snakemake.
• Biomarker discovery experience.
• deployment experience onto AWS, azure or cloud
• More often now there is also an expectation to have familiarity or expertise in machine learning and/or ai.

The majority of clients within in this field will look for a PhD or master’s, that is heavily focused on computational biology, bioinformatics, Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, Biotechnology.