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 engineering capability to support this ambition.
We are looking for a Full-Stack focused Senior Software Engineer to join our cross-functional Participant Engagement squad. You'll be helping participants stay connected to Our Future Health, giving them clear, meaningful reasons to return to the platform, understand the impact of their involvement, and feel confident taking part in future research.
Our tech-stack includes Python, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Terraform (IaC), running in Azure (Kubernetes and Azure AppService). Our engineers are full-stack, handling frontend, backend and infrastructure in a total ownership model - squads build and run it.
Experimentation will be a key part of the role, so we’re looking for someone who brings initiative, is comfortable exploring ideas, and can help us validate what resonates before we invest in longer-term solutions.
The role combines practical engineering with opportunities to influence how engagement evolves, helping us deliver quick wins today while laying the groundwork for long-term impact on participant trust, confidence, and research readiness.
In this role, you will:
- Work in a small, growing team where you’ll contribute both to early design and hands-on delivery
- Help shape and build the experiences that deepen participant understanding and motivation, making thoughtful decisions about what to develop, when to reuse, and how to optimise the journeys people already see
- Design systems that encourage people to return, explore insights, share additional data, and take part in studies
- As the work is still in its early stages, you’ll often move across the stack, from front-end features built with TypeScript and modern frameworks to backend and data-driven work in Python, depending on what the problem calls for
- Learn from real behaviour and iterate quickly based on what works
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:
Technical Skills
- Experience building cloud-hosted consumer applications using open source technologies such as Python or Node
- Knowledge of modern frontend development, including JavaScript/TypeScript with frameworks like React or Next.js, and experience building intuitive, user-focused interfaces
- Experience designing and implementing backend systems – ideally using Python – for data movement, processing, and storage
- Experience working on consumer-facing products where experimentation, rapid iteration, and learning from user behaviour are important
- Prior experience with Azure (ideally), AWS or GCP
- Comfortable working with Infrastructure as Code, ideally with knowledge of Terraform
- Knowledge of good data modelling and design patterns; in-depth knowledge of relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL) and familiarity with other types of data store (blob, document, graph)
- Expertise in modern, agile development practices like code review, TDD, CI/CD and pairing using tools like Git and GitHub
- Experience of operationally managing software components once live, including observability, logging, metrics, error reporting, debugging and live incident management
- Experience of working with sensitive personal data
Competencies
- Experience working in/with cross-functional teams consisting of e.g. engineers, product, UX and non-technical stakeholders
- Ability to communicate with stakeholders and audiences outside your own team
- Experience working in small, growing organisations with a high degree of ambiguity, where flexibility is valued
- Strong understanding of software quality principles and practices
- Comfortable in mentoring and coaching less experienced engineers
- Comfortable in taking part in- and sometimes facilitating technical discussions
Benefits
- Competitive base salary from £88,000
- 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]
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.
