Looking for a meaningful job with concrete societal impact? SIB is recognized as one of the leading biological and biomedical data science organizations worldwide. Our scientific and support teams apply their expertise to a range of projects spanning some of the grand challenges of our times, from biodiversity and health to innovation and scientific excellence. Find out what it means to work in such an environment, where excellence is enabled by a human approach to data science, the roles you could be taking on, some key figures about our employees and meet some of them.
Why choose to work at SIB
This could be you!
To enable us to bring our mission and vision to life, we rely on a wide range of expertise and positions, some of which listed below. As Data scientists for life, our experts combine a detailed understanding of the biological or biomedical data they work with with cutting-edge technical and technological skills - and the ability to collaborate on and coordinate complex and large-scale projects. Depending on the role, these skills are more or less directly called upon, but all our employees are able to train in these areas if necessary.
You develop and apply innovative computational methods to large collections of biological data and make them speak.
You train the next generation of bioinformaticians and life scientists to make the best of the latest advances in computational biology.
You create and optimize tools to store, organize, integrate and/or visualize data, enabling efficient and accurate analysis or reuse.
You devise and implement data management solutions for national or international projects to foster FAIR principles.
Supported by the latest technologies, you expertly annotate and develop internationally renowned knowledge resources.
Your professional expertise in domains such as finance, legal, human resources, communication or IT, empowers our projects and strategic goals.
A few figures
International, gender-balanced, committed and connected: discover our workforce in numbers*, and keep reading to know more about our efforts towards Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
*as of 01.01.25
47% women and 53% men among all employees
186 employees part of a network of 885 members based in the country's major academic institutions
8 years
of median length of service
with 23% of our employees having been at SIB for over ten years
22 nationalities
In their own words
Do not take our word for it but find out what our employees think about their activities, work environment and conditions.
I particularly appreciate the freedom, trust, support and humaneness that SIB fosters among its employees. Additionally, the focus on scientific integrity and the high level of expertise within the organization are truly remarkable.
For an institute of 200 employees, SIB has a strong people-oriented culture, which is quite exceptional in the life science landscape”. Meet Geert van Geest, who joined SIB in 2020 as a computational biologist at the University of Bern and a trainer in SIB Training group. He shares with us how his career benefits from the complementarity between his two roles, as well as some of the projects of which he is particularly proud, around Open Science and FAIR Principles.
I am impressed by how employees and members are involved in their job. One can really feel their passion for their fields, and this passion is viral and a great source of inspiration in daily tasks.
Working at SIB means supporting the research community with internationally recognized tools and services. It also means working in a flexible and autonomy-driven environment.
I am Team Lead, Software Development in the Computational Structural Biology Group of Torsten Schwede. I apply my programming skills to the development and optimization of bioinformatics resources such as SWISS-MODEL – an SIB core resource – for the life science community.
I joined SIB in 2003 as a software developer. Since then I have worked in data management, front-end and back-end development and UX Design. Although women in software development are still too rare, in my experience you do not have to change who you are to feel you belong, and be valued in a team.
I am a biocurator in SIB’s Swiss-Prot Group, specializing in the manual annotation of proteins of human origin, as well as those from other vertebrates. My job is to ensure that knowledge is extracted from the best-quality biological data generated from the literature and that such knowledge becomes accessible to the community.