Peter Saffrey

I am an experienced and pragmatic technical practitioner who is primarily motivated by delivering against project goals. I have been working in computational sciences and software engineering since the start of my PhD in 1999, with extensive experience across biotech, drug discovery, energy and civil engineering.

Sep 2023–present Director Software Engineering and Bioinformatics, biomodal Ltd

Led software engineering, bioinformatics and infrastructure functions for biotech startup. 

• Led BFX team (6 people) in the refresh of bioinformatics pipeline software. Reduced typical runtime from 16 to 7 hours; CPU hours from 14k to 5k; similar reductions in disk usage and cost. Refreshed the overall process for both delivery and field escalations.
• Led Platform team (4 people) in reducing GCP spend from $120k/month to $70k/month.
• Designed, built and delivered metrics viewing and download dashboard (“DataMart”).

Jan–Sep 2023 Solutions Architect, Brilliant Planet Ltd

Software infrastructure and strategy development for a greentech startup. 

• Led refresh of hydraulics modelling, including creating GUI and visualisation capability in React/Typescript. Tools used in marketing, communications and decision making.
• Data engineering/management for scientific and field data including frontend tooling.

Feb 2021–Jan 2023 Associate Director, Software Engineering, Astex Therapeutics

Senior software engineer within a 9-person bioinformatics group. 

• Designed, built and delivered GUI tool to annotate, explore and filter potential target genes for drug discovery process using React/Typescript (“WatchLists”).
• Championed and led refinements to software process, including adoption of Agile processes, centralized documentation, GitLab, dashboard-based prototyping.

Apr 2020–Jan 2021 Data Science Tech Lead, Origami Energy Ltd

• Led machine learning team (5 people) delivering wind farm output prediction. Delivered prototype to customer and iterated on solution.

April 2015–Mar 2019 Bioinformatics Team Lead, Illumina Cambridge Inc.

• Led design, development and delivery of CLI tooling for Illumina cloud platform (BaseSpaceCLI). Also produced public-facing documentation and trained tech support. 
• Led development team (2 people) building productivity tooling for high-throughput genome sequencing lab. Three frontend tools adopted and used in marketing materials.

Sep 2011–Mar 2015 Bioinformatics Data Scientist Illumina Cambridge Inc.

• Designed, built and delivered full-stack task submission and management application for analysis pipelines. Deployed across three continents running thousands of tasks a year.
• Designed, built and delivered full-stack storage management solution (Python/MySQL/JQuery). Saved Illumina >$1m per year by cleaning up unneeded data.

2002 PhD: “Optimising Communication Structure for Model Checking” - University of Glasgow

1999 BSc (Hons) Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science - University of Birmingham