Technical Lead - Participant Platforms

Our Future Health will be the UK's largest ever health research programme, bringing people together to develop new ways to detect, prevent and treat diseases. We are a charity, supported by the UK Government, in partnership with charities and industry. We work closely with the NHS and with public authorities across all nations and regions of the UK.

Despite big improvements in healthcare in our lifetimes, today millions of people in the UK still live in poor health as they get older. Diseases like cancer, dementia, diabetes, and heart disease affect the lives of many people in our communities. Our goal is to create a world-leading resource for health research, to improve our understanding and spot the patterns of how and why common diseases start, so treatments can begin sooner and be more effective.

Our plan is to bring together 5 million volunteers from right across the UK who will be asked to contribute information to help build one of the most detailed pictures we have ever had of people's health. Researchers will be able to use this information to make new discoveries about human health and diseases. So future generations can live in good health for longer. About the role:

We are looking for a Technical Lead to join a small team designing and building the platforms and systems to power one of the world's largest long-term population health programmes. The role will suit someone who has experience in software engineering and architecture for large-scale web systems.

The environment will be mixed, with external technology suppliers, licensed software as well as from-scratch software development. You will be joining a greenfield project, at the start, working out how all the pieces fit together. The work will involve technical design and architecture, working with a multidisciplinary in-house team, serving the needs of both the Our Future Health participants and researchers from industry, charities and academia. You will also be a vital member of the team who will prototype, innovate and solve challenging issues of scale, performance, reach and accessibility across a broad spectrum of society.

You will lead on our participant-facing websites and apps and related backend systems. Some of these will be deployed across healthcare settings such as blood donation clinics, GP surgeries and hospitals and involve collection, processing and tracking of blood samples; others will be apps that participants use longer-term, with health questionnaires, or providing health feedback.

We are hiring two Technical Leads at the moment; the other will lead on our data platforms. The two roles will work together closely as well as across the technology team so that one can cover for the other if necessary. We'll be facing many technical challenges as we scale to reach a large percentage of the UK population:

• Designing and building multiple routes for participants to join the programme, both directly on a phone or browser and in-person in healthcare settings
• Linking to numerous large-scale health datasets such as medical records, scans and imaging; processing genetic data
• Providing personalised health feedback
• Creating systems for researchers from around the world to securely access the datasets and perform analysis ranging from genomics and bioinformatics pipelines to machine learning
• Establishing and maintaining very high standards of privacy, data governance and cybersecurity
• Reaching a highly diverse population with appropriate and accessible solutions
• Linking to activity tracking, wearable and fitness data
• Most importantly helping create a culture, processes and values as we build an amazing team

We have an office in central London and a team that is hybrid, with some working fully remotely and attending in-person sessions monthly, and others based in London working flexibly from the office or home. Main responsibilities:

• You will act as a technology lead for our participant-facing websites and apps, such as those for initial recruitment of participants (many of which will be used in healthcare settings including the collection of a blood sample)
• This role will be part of our software group led by our Lead Architect. You will work closely with the Lead Architect as well as members of our product, design, study operations and technical operations teams
• This role will be a blend of architecture and software engineering, so could suit a senior engineer, a technical lead or an architect. We are looking for a mix of hands-on skills in terms of leading software development as well as troubleshooting, and design and architecture skills as we create new systems
• You will collaborate with colleagues to develop plans related to the architecture, technical design, data flows, scaling and functionality of the services
• You will lead on significant technology components within the projects
• You will participate in testing, troubleshooting and live operations issues that are escalated from other teams
  

• Strong experience in software engineering across a variety of languages and frameworks
• Domain expertise with large-scale consumer web and mobile services
• Working with high availability live systems on AWS, GCP or Azure
• Hands-on experience with DevOps automation / infrastructure-as-code toolsets such as Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes
• Comfortable with API design and architectural styles such as REST, oAuth, and architectural patterns such as microservices, serverless, federated systems
• Working in an agile methodology; used to code reviews and pairing
• Experience designing for scale and troubleshooting scaling and performance problems; good understanding of technology stacks from networks up to applications
• Excellent communicator in person, in writing, when presenting, when creating diagrams, specifications and documentation

In addition, experience in a health domain would be extremely valuable, which could be clinical, wearables, consumer apps, genomics, pharma/life sciences or NHS.

• Screening videoconference
• Technical interview with scenario task
• Team interview
• Wrap up / Q&A