R Developer with Life Science Background

About the role

This position is for an R Developer with a life‑science background, based in South Africa. The role sits at the intersection of software engineering, data science and biology, creating production‑grade R and Shiny applications that support drug discovery, clinical trials and biomedical analytics.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain high‑quality R and Shiny applications for biological and clinical data analysis.
• Process, analyse and visualise complex life‑science datasets, ensuring reproducibility and usability.
• Build and maintain reusable R packages and data‑processing components.
• Collaborate with scientists, bioinformaticians and data engineers to gather requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
• Develop interactive visualisation tools to aid research and clinical decision‑making.
• Use Git for version control and collaborative development.
• Participate in system design discussions, backlog refinement and continuous improvement of development practices.
• Support deployment and maintenance of production‑grade applications in cloud or distributed environments.

Required profile

• Strong proficiency in R programming with hands‑on experience in production settings.
• Experience working with biological, clinical or life‑science data.
• Proven experience building web applications using R Shiny or JavaScript.
• Experience creating, maintaining and documenting R packages.
• Solid understanding of Git and collaborative software development workflows.
• Master’s degree in Bioinformatics, Data Science, Computer Science, Biostatistics, Mathematics or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• Good understanding of molecular biology, genomics or clinical research concepts is desirable.
• Ability to translate complex scientific requirements into scalable technical solutions.

Required skills

• R programming
• R Shiny
• JavaScript
• Git
• R package development
• Data visualisation