Our Future Health is an ambitious collaboration between the public, charity and private sectors, designed to help people live healthier lives for longer through better prevention, earlier detection and improved treatment of diseases. We will speed up the discovery of new methods of early disease detection, and the evaluation of new diagnostic tools, to help identify and treat diseases early, when outcomes are usually better. With over 2.5M volunteers across the UK, we’re now the world’s biggest health research programme of its kind, and our volunteer group is also more diverse than other, similar health research programmes.
Technology and data are central to our mission. Our systems power web sites, clinics across the UK, secure analytics and research systems, pipelines that process highly sensitive health and genetic data, and we are continuing to grow our data science capability to support this ambition.
Through our newly launched Clinical Research Recruitment Service, we enable clinical research teams to find the right participants, faster. As this service grows, we have a unique opportunity to transform proven, expert-led recruitment workflows into scalable technology that enhances, rather than replaces, clinical judgement. Our ambition is to deliver increasingly seamless recruitment experiences for our customers by building data-led capabilities that capture what works best today and make it repeatable, reliable, and scalable tomorrow.
In the near term, this means building better data foundations and tools that support expert-led recruitment as it works today. As we learn what can be reliably standardised, these capabilities will increasingly support more streamlined and self‑service ways of working for customers.
The Senior Data Scientist will help turn this ambition into reality by shaping the data foundations and technical capabilities we build. You will bring a strong understanding of clinical recruitment workflows and apply it to the design of data products, analytical services, and enabling infrastructure. Working closely with engineers and scientific and operational experts, you will help guide how our recruitment technology evolves, ensuring it delivers immediate value while positioning us for long-term scale.
What you’ll do
- Work closely with science, data and engineering teams to understand how recruitment feasibility and cohort selection are delivered in practice, and how customers engage with these outputs.
- Help translate existing recruitment workflows into clear data and technical requirements, supporting engineers to build capabilities that reflect operational and user needs.
- Contribute to the development of data products and services that underpin recruitment delivery, from internal tools used by expert teams through to capabilities that may later support customer‑facing workflows.
- Build and maintain production‑quality code, with a focus on trust, transparency, and fitness for use in a regulated environment.
- Support early prototyping and iterative delivery, using hands‑on experience to inform what is ready to be standardised, automated, or scaled.
- Define and document data requirements and pipeline logic, assumptions, and quality checks, working with others to ensure recruitment outputs remain reliable, interpretable and auditable as usage grows.
- Collaborate with governance, privacy, and compliance colleagues to ensure ethical, regulatory, and data protection requirements are embedded into how data is used and shared.
- Share insights from delivery, customer interactions, and data usage to help inform priorities and sequencing as recruitment technology evolves over time.
This role will be fully hybrid with the expectation we get together in our Holborn, London office at least once per month.
Requirements
We welcome applications from all who may not feel they match the full criteria, so if you have most of the below, we'd like to hear from you:
- Significant experience applying data science or advanced analytics within health, life sciences, or clinical research contexts.
- Strong understanding of clinical research recruitment, feasibility assessment, or cohort identification workflows, and how these are delivered in practice.
- Experience working with real‑world health or clinical datasets (e.g. electronic health records, registries, or research cohorts).
- Ability to translate clinical and operational requirements into clear analytical and technical approaches.
- Experience collaborating closely with software engineers on production systems, including contributing to the design of data pipelines or services.
- Strong programming skills (Python preferred, SQL, and version control) with the ability to write maintainable, auditable code suitable for production use.
- Familiarity with working in regulated or governed data environments, with an appreciation of ethical, privacy, and compliance requirements.
- Experience working in or alongside CROs, digital CROs, clinical research organisations, or clinical technology companies is desirable.
- Comfortable working in ambiguous problem spaces, where requirements emerge through delivery, learning, and iteration.
- Able to communicate complex concepts clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences, and to contribute effectively within cross‑functional teams.
- Pragmatic, thoughtful, and motivated by creating real‑world impact through collaborative problem‑solving.
Hiring Process
We feel hiring should be transparent and give you a real sense for what Our Future Health is like. Here's what you can expect:
- Initial chat with our Talent team (30 min) to get to know each other, discuss the role, and answer any questions you have.
- 1st interview with our Head of Data Operations (25 min) - this is an opportunity to meet your potential line manager and for you both to align on role expectations.
- Technical interview with 2-3 members from our tech and data teams (60 min). This will include a short task you’ll need to prepare in advance of the interview and is designed to get a sense for how you'd approach the real-world responsibilities of this role.
- Final stage competency interview (60 min) with a small cross-functional panel of your potential new stakeholders. This will focus on how you collaborate, work with stakeholders, and navigate ambiguity and challenges in real-world projects.
Benefits
- Competitive base salary from £75,000
- 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
- EV Scheme – Save up to 40% on a brand new electric vehicle all-inclusive package 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
Join us - let’s prevent disease together.
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]
Skills Required
- Significant experience applying data science or advanced analytics in health or clinical research contexts
- Strong understanding of clinical research recruitment, feasibility assessment, or cohort identification workflows
- Experience with real‑world health or clinical datasets
- Ability to translate clinical and operational requirements into analytical and technical approaches
- Experience collaborating with software engineers on production systems
- Strong programming skills in Python, SQL, and version control
- Familiarity with working in regulated data environments
- Experience with CROs or clinical technology companies
- Ability to communicate complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences
- Motivated by creating real-world impact through problem-solving
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.
