Arjun Rao
Senior Principal Scientist at IDEAYA Biosciences
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolArjun Rao is a Senior Principal Scientist based in San Francisco with 11 years of experience at the intersection of immuno-informatics and cancer biology, currently advancing synthetic lethality programs at IDEAYA Biosciences. He combines a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology with hands-on expertise in neo-epitope discovery and adoptive T‑cell immunotherapy from UCSC and UCSF research roles. Equally fluent in computational infrastructure, he has contributed backend and DevOps improvements to the widely used Toil workflow engine, optimizing file-store caching and worker cleanup under real-world conditions. Arjun pairs rigorous translational science with practical engineering—he prototypes lab-adjacent solutions and tinkers with Arduino/Raspberry Pi projects in his spare time—bringing a pragmatic, systems-thinking approach to complex biological problems.
11 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
FAPSB.E Biotechnology, B.E Biotechnology at PESIT, BangaloreUniversity of California Santa Cruz
English, Hindi, Konkani
Github Skills (12)
caching10
file-management10
workflow-engine10
python10
testing10
pipeline8
devops8
aws5
kubernetes4
kubernetes-pods4
dockers3
docker3
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
DataBiosphere/toil
Oct 2015 - Oct 2017
A scalable, efficient, cross-platform (Linux/macOS) and easy-to-use workflow engine in pure Python.
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:48 commits, 41 PRs, 8 pushes in 2 years
Contributions summary:Arjun's contributions center on testing and improving the file store functionality within the Toil workflow engine. The user added tests to assess the performance of read/write operations when file sizes exceed or are less than the cache size. Moreover, the user's work extends to enhancing the test suite with new test cases, and modifying the system to better accommodate for worker cleanup operations upon shutdown. The user also contributed to optimizations related to resource management, specifically the caching mechanism to address potential race conditions.
pythoncommon-workflow-languagemesosawsslurm
arkal/toil_docker_wrappers
Oct 2015 - Apr 2018
Contributions:1 PR, 53 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 6 months
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