Our Future Health is looking for a Data Architect with experience of large data architectures who relishes the opportunity to bring their expertise to the world’s largest health research programme. The successful Data Architect will challenge and support technical teams to think critically about the right solution for the long-term, while facilitating the pragmatic trade-offs needed to launch products.
Our plan is to bring together 5 million volunteers from right across the UK who will be asked to contribute information to help build one of the most detailed pictures we have ever had of people’s health. Researchers will be able to use this information to make new discoveries about human health and diseases. So future generations can live in good health for longer.
What you’ll be doing
In this role you will define data architecture for our data, analytics and researcher platforms, setting out at high level what data needs to reside where and why, and how data is managed from collection to use. Your key responsibilities will also include:
- Oversee the design of multiple data models at a strategic level and have a broad understanding of how each model fulfils the needs of the organisation.
- Develop principles that guide teams producing data specifications and data models at the level of a system or product, including our data releases for researchers. You provide advice to teams designing lower-level data models, championing consistency, and enabling data to be used for multiple purposes and combined when needed.
- Partner with technical teams to develop high-level designs and patterns that can be applied across services and platforms, such as how data flows between systems, how data quality is assessed, how data is versioned, and how IDs are managed.
- You will think ahead to how data might need to be used in future and promote a flexible architecture across all our systems.
- Respond to problems related to the availability of data for specific use cases, helping teams understand the changes that are needed to our data architecture to enable these.
- Engage in an early-stage discussions with senior leaders and discovery teams about new value streams and products.
- Detect anti-patterns (e.g. duplicated data, sending data to too many different places, accidentally creating unnecessary dependencies across teams due to modelling decisions), and advocate for work to address these.
- Develop an architecture which is meets data security and data governance requirements, for example enables data to be appropriately created, stored, used and deleted across its lifecycle.
- Identify, understand and balance security, engineering, product, financial, operational and governance considerations related to the design of data-related capabilities, data models, and data flows.
You can develop high-level designs that span multiple service and platforms, working in close partnership with technical architects and engineering teams. You will also have some of the following skills and experience:
- You bring a strengths-based and growth mindset, being willing to learn and support others to do the same.
- You have extensive specialist knowledge of and ability to provide leadership of all aspects of data platforms, across domains (e.g. back-end systems, analytics platforms, CRMs) and across industry disciplines (e.g. data modelling and design, data quality, master and reference data, data standards, and metadata).
- You can work with people from a wide range of backgrounds, gathering and responding to feedback on your designs, and gaining buy in.
- You can jump into specific issues, supporting the solving of problems in a way that aligns with the long-term direction of travel.
- You have hands-on engineering experience building scalable, modern data systems in the cloud.
- You have strong experience of acting as a single point of contact for senior stakeholders and influencers.
- Ideally, you have experience working with sensitive data or in a regulated environment.
Technical Skills:
- You are a technical leader in data modelling (e.g. dimensional data modelling) ideally with experience of international health informatics specific standards (SNOMED CT, OMOP, FHIR), including bioinformatics (VCFs).
- You are experienced working with data lakes and data lakehouses.
- You are familiar with either Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery.
- You understand distributed computing (Spark) and its implications for data storage.
- Familiarity with data mesh architecture.
- You are familiar with a range of cloud-based tools for orchestration, data storage and processing, observability, and analytics.
- Competitive annum basic salary.
- Generous company pension package with employer contributions of up to 12%.
- 30 days annual leave (plus bank holidays).
- Continuous career development with regular appraisals and learning and development opportunities.
- A lovely new office in Holborn, Central London – we offer flexible and remote working arrangements.
Join us - let’s prevent disease together.
Top Skills
What We Do
Our Future Health is the UK’s largest ever health research programme, bringing people together to develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases.
Our mission is to create an incredibly detailed picture of the UK population’s health, by recruiting up to five million adult volunteers from across the UK. Each volunteer will be asked to fill out a questionnaire and provide a blood sample that can be linked to their health records. Taken together, the data will present health researchers with a powerful tool to identify new ways of tackling diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and dementia.
It's an unprecedented challenge that involves answering questions that have never been asked before – ethical, practical, and technological. And by getting these answers right, we believe Our Future Health will allow future generations to live in good health for longer.
We are currently expanding our team and looking for specialists across various fields – people who are motivated by the opportunity of creating something new that will make a difference to society. Click on the Jobs tab above to start exploring our current opportunities.
Our Future Health is a registered charity in England, Wales and Scotland.
