Matt McGuffie
PhD
Bay Area
bioinformatics • software engineering • design
I'm a bioinformatician and software engineer with a PhD in microbiology. I'm interested in bringing good design to bioinformatics by architecting reliable, scalable software and producing clear, user-friendly outputs that simplify scientists’ workflows. I enjoy writing everything from core algorithms to production pipeline code to frontend visualizations. In addition to 8 years of bioinformatics expertise, I have about 15 years at the bench, which allows me to intimately understand the needs of wetlab scientists.
industry,
2025
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2023
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2023
Bioinformatics Lead
PlasmidsaurusBay Area
- •designed company-wide bioinformatics compute architecture that scaled to millions of samples
- •setup & maintained a global HPC cluster using Slurm, Ansible, & Docker
- •created intuitive, customer-facing bioinformatics reports
- •helped build out team of bioinformaticians
2023
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2022
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2022
Bioinformatician
PlasmidsaurusRemote
- •developed full-stack genomic assembly pipelines from raw reads to delivery of automated reports to customers
- •merged all bioinformatics codebases during merger event
- •implemented cloud+on-premise CI/CD for bioinformatics codebases
- •reduced bioinformatics pipeline runtime from ~1.5 hours to ~3 minutes
academia,
2023
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2017
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2017
2017
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2015
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2015
2015
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2013
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2013
selected work,
Web app and CLI tool for easily annotating and visualizing plasmid sequences. It has become the industry standard and has annotated millions of plasmids and other engineered sequences. github.com/mmcguffi/plannotate