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.

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 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.

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.

Responsibilities

• Represent technology/architecture/engineering in cross-functional project teams throughout a project’s lifecycle (from ideation to implementation).
• Work with your peer staff engineers and Head of Engineering to act as a guiding mind for the engineering/architecture in your business area.
• Lead decision-making on critical technical strategy and implementations which affect your business area.
• Identify opportunities for and then carry out specific pieces of high-impact hands-on work where it makes sense.
• Work with partners and suppliers to integrate their systems with Our Future Health’s.
• Support your colleagues with pairing, peer reviews, coaching, discussion, and other collaborative activities.
• Contribute to the reliability, resilience and ongoing evolution of critical research platform services and live systems where required.

Requirements

• 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 and event-driven architectures.
• Appreciation of the balance between “build” and “buy” and experience of weighing up pros and cons.
• Knowledge and experience of building cloud-hosted consumer web applications and backend services using open source technologies such as Node.js, Ruby on Rails, or Python.
• 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).
• 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 and live incident management.
• Experience of working with sensitive personal data.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary from £105,000
• Generous Pension Scheme – employer contributions of up to 12%
• 30 Days Holiday pro rata + Bank Holidays
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Home & Tech Savings via salary sacrifice
• EV Scheme
• £1,000 Employee Referral Bonus
• Wellbeing Support including 24/7 online GP services
• Central London office in Holborn with flexible and remote working arrangements

Our Future Health does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other reason prohibited by law.