Our Future Health will be the UK’s largest ever health research programme, bringing people together to develop new ways to detect, prevent, and treat diseases. Diseases like cancer, dementia, diabetes, and heart disease affect the lives of many people in our communities. Our goal is to create a world-leading resource for health research, to improve our understanding and spot the patterns of how and why common diseases start, so treatments can begin sooner and be more effective.
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.
We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to bring an in-depth knowledge of health and survey data and data solutions to help solve some of the key challenges around a programme of work at industrial scale with global significance.
- You will write and contribute code to a complex code base responsible for delivering data to researchers on an industrial scale.
- You will work with health records and build pipelines and systems to process it, control quality and create data releases for researchers.
Our Senior Data Engineer will have experience contributing to complex code bases shared with multiple engineers. You know how to create repeatable and reusable products. You know how to communicate to and between technical and non-technical stakeholders as well as facilitate discussions within a multidisciplinary team including scientists, software engineers, product managers and other data engineers.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
- Support the build of data pipelines from data providers to our primary data store and trusted research environment. Support the design, scoping and build of data flows.
- Produce logic for data transformation steps as code, which meets the requirements for our end users and builds well curated, accessible and quality controlled data for analysis.
- Contribute to code base for multiple data pipelines while ensuring best coding practises are used.
- Work with data scientists and epidemiologists to understand the data requirements and work with them to deliver the data needed for their projects.
- Keep abreast of best practice in data engineering across industry, research and Government and facilitating the adoption of standards.
Requirements
- Experience building and maintaining robust, scalable and efficient data pipelines. Capable of processing very large amounts of data based on feeds from multiple systems using a range of different technologies.
- Can listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders and interpret them, and effectively manage stakeholder expectations.
- Experience working with health data (ideally NHS or survey/questionnaire data). Experience working with well-known secondary care datasets (Hospital Episodes Statistics, Death registry data, A&E data etc) as well as Primary care (GP data) would be advantageous. Experience working with survey/questionnaire data and standards (REDCap) would be advantageous.
- Highly proficient in Python with solid command line knowledge and Unix skills.
- Good understanding of cloud environments (ideally Azure), distributed computing and optimising workflows and pipelines.
- Understanding of common data transformation and storage formats, e.g. Apache Parquet, Delta tables.
- Understanding of containerisation (e.g. Docker) and deployment (e.g. Kubernetes).
- Experience with Spark, Databricks, data lakes.
- Follow best practices like code review, clean code and unit tests.
- Experience working in an agile development team. Familiar with version control and Git/GitHub.
- Awareness of data standards such as GA4GH ( https://www.ga4gh.org/) and FAIR (https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/).
Let's prevent disease together.
Benefits
- Salary from £74,000.
- Generous Pension Scheme – We invest in your future with employer contributions of up to 12%.
- 30 Days Holiday pro rata + Bank Holidays – Enjoy a generous holiday allowance with the flexibility to take bank holidays when it suits you.
- Enhanced Parental Leave – Supporting you during life’s biggest moments.
- Cycle to Work Scheme – Save 25-39% on a new bike and accessories through salary sacrifice.
- Home & Tech Savings – Get up to 8% off on IKEA and Currys products, spreading the cost over 12 months through salary sacrifice
- £1,000 Employee Referral Bonus – Know someone amazing? Get rewarded for bringing them on board!
- Wellbeing Support – Access to Mental Health First Aiders, plus 24/7 online GP services and an Employee Assistance Programme for you and your family.
- A Great Place to Work – We have a lovely Central London office in Holborn, and offer flexible and remote working arrangements.
You may work remotely from anywhere within the UK, with occasional travel to London.
Closing date for applications : 12th November.
We recommend you apply as soon as possible as occasionally due to high volumes of applications, we need to close our postings early.
At Our Future Health, we recognise the importance of having a diverse workforce and ensuring that all candidates, regardless of their background, have equitable access to our application process. We proactively encourage applicants who identify as having a disability, neurodiversity, or long-term health conditions to let us know if they require any reasonable adjustments as part of their application process.
If you do require any reasonable adjustments, please email us at [email protected]
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.
