Job Details

Staff Engineer (Architect) - Researcher Operations

Our Future Health

Overview

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.  
£105,000
Per year
Full time, Permanent
(Full-time hours)
London

Key information

We are looking for a Staff Engineer (Architect) to own the high-level design of our researcher operations systems. As Our Future Health moves to expand its researcher offering we need to build and operate new systems related to acquiring researchers, onboarding them, taking them through the study application process, and maintaining our relationship with them.

About the role

The role will require working with other functions at Our Future Health such as Finance, Customer Support, and we expect it to involve a mixture of bespoke building of select components alongside configuration and integration of SaaS products like CRM, ticketing, support, and email comms systems. Where we build our own components you will work with product development squads to define the design and requirements for the component and then support the squad as they build it. 

The researcher onboarding and study application processes are vitally important to Our Future Health since they form our implementation of two principles from the “Five Safes” framework for safe research access to data - “safe people” and “safe projects”. 

As well as the responsibilities specific to the researcher operations area, as a member of the Architecture team you will also play a key role in general architecture activities at Our Future Health - working with other engineers to guide the wider platform design, work on cross-platform projects which add new platform-side capabilities, represent technology in the early stages of future projects, and so on. 

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 

Requirements

We will be interviewing for this role as suitable applications are received and may close this role before the closing date upon a successful candidate being appointed.

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 

  • You have led the architectural design of systems. 
  • Experience of configuring and integrating off-the-shelf SaaS systems with bespoke web and backend applications, via APIs, event-driven architectures, etc. 
  • Appreciation of the balance between “build” and “buy”, experience of weighing up pros and cons to make a selection which will fit into the wider organisation’s systems and meet the needs of organisational internal users and goals. 
  • Knowledge and experience of building cloud-hosted consumer web applications and backend services using open source technologies such as Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Python in a start-up or scale-up environment. 
  • 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 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.