Job Description
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 websites, 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 Principal Engineer to join our Technology team to help lead the technical design, procurement, build and integration of the next iteration of the Our Future Health “trusted research environment” (TRE). Our current TRE has been successful but we are now thinking about our future challenges around scale (the unique volumes of data Our Future Health expects to collect over the next 5-10 years (including potentially whole genome sequencing data on millions of our volunteers)) and usability (including future AI tools). The TRE is also key to unlocking the commercial revenue growth Our Future Health will be seeking over the next few years to ultimately become self-sustaining for the decades to come.
This year we will be doing a procurement to find a partner (or partners) to work with us to solve these challenges. The role will have an incredibly high impact - to enable research at this scale has never been done before, we will be creating a beyond-cutting edge system, but it is a necessary step in order for Our Future Health to have the national and global impact we are aiming for.
Our Future Health exists as part of a wider health data and research community in the UK and across the world, the TRE is a key part of this. This role will involve representing Our Future Health in and collaborating with this wider community, working with our founding industry members, our users, other research organisations and biobanks.
You will also be joining the wider Technology team at Our Future Heath at a very senior level and expected to take on typical engineering and architecture leadership activities.
Responsibilities inc -
- Work with technology and organisational leadership on long-term strategic initiatives, helping shape the future evolution of Our Future Health’s Trusted Research Environment (TRE) and wider research platform capabilities.
- Provide technical leadership across complex areas including trusted research environments, secure data platforms, health data, governance, privacy and regulated research environments.
- Contribute to organisation-wide technical roadmaps and cross-team initiatives, helping teams deliver scalable, secure and researcher-focused platform capabilities.
- Lead and contribute to technical decisions with significant architectural impact across the TRE, data platform and wider technology ecosystem.
- Represent Our Future Health externally with partners, suppliers and the wider health research and technology community.
- Identify and deliver high-impact technical and architectural work where hands-on leadership is needed, particularly around platform design, integration and data architecture challenges at scale.
- Work closely with vendors and partners to integrate external systems, services and research tooling into the Our Future Health platform and TRE ecosystem.
- Support and mentor engineers through collaboration, technical guidance, peer review and architectural coaching, helping maintain high engineering standards across the organisation.
- Contribute to the reliability, resilience and ongoing evolution of critical research platform services and live systems where required.
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
- Ideally familiar with how trusted research environments / secure data environments work.
- Deep experience using a broad range of cloud storage services and technologies.
- Familiarity with how Platform-as-a-Service systems work, including running third-party code and tools on shared compute and storage infrastructure.
- Strong understanding of data access security and governance practices.
- Understanding of health data research tools and technologies such as data browsers, Jupyter notebooks and R.
- Desirable: understanding of tools and technologies related to working with genetic data.
- Understanding of LLMs and how they may be deployed or used within user-facing environments.
- Experience leading or contributing to the architectural design of complex software systems.
- Strong technical expertise across relevant technologies and domains.
- Comfortable working with Infrastructure as Code.
- Experience working in a technical leadership role within modern agile development teams, using practices such as code review, TDD, CI/CD and pairing using tools like Git and GitHub.
- Experience operating and managing live software systems, including observability, logging, metrics, error reporting, debugging and incident management.
Competencies
Comfortable working with partner organisations and stakeholders across technical and non-technical teams.
Experience with vendor selection processes, including writing RFPs, working with potential vendors and vendor evaluation.
Experience working across cross-functional teams consisting of engineering, product, UX and operational stakeholders.
Experience leading or coordinating work across multiple teams to deliver shared objectives.
Comfortable facilitating complex technical discussions with organisation-wide impact, encouraging collaboration and providing direction where needed.
Strong communication skills, including the ability to engage effectively with stakeholders and audiences at different levels, including executive leadership (CTO, CPO and similar).
Knowledge and experience of applying operational, security and legal considerations when designing solutions, particularly within regulated or sensitive data environments, with the ability to articulate trade-offs and make informed technical decisions.
Experience working in small, growing organisations with ambiguity, where flexibility is valued.
Strong understanding of software quality and experience driving quality improvement initiatives across multiple teams.
Experience mentoring engineers at different stages of their careers.
Competitive base salary from £120,000
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 talent@ourfuturehealth.org.uk
