Principal Engineer – FTC; office locations

Company Description

Genomics England partners with the NHS to provide whole genome sequencing diagnostics. We also equip researchers to find the causes of disease and develop new treatments – with patients and participants at the heart of it all.

Our mission is to continue refining, scaling, and evolving our ability to enable others to deliver genomic healthcare and conduct genomic research.

We are accelerating our impact and working with patients, doctors, scientists, government and industry to improve genomic testing, and help researchers access the health data and technology they need to make new medical discoveries and create more effective, targeted medicines for everybody.

Are you passionate about nurturing innovation and empowering teams to solve complex, high impact technical problems? At Genomics England we are looking for two Principal Engineers to join the business in evolving and expanding the reach of genomics in the UK population.

One of these roles will be working within our bio-pipelines service, where genomic data is processed to support critical clinical judgments. The Principal Engineer here will bring senior technical leadership to the modernisation of our bioinformatics workflows to support a growing number of strategic use‑cases. The other will play a pivotal role in designing and delivering the technology to support a new population genomics programme.

This programme will generate evidence and digital infrastructure to help make genomics a routine part of healthcare.

As a Principal Engineer you will be a hands‑on contributor with exemplary engineering skills, who can also think strategically to define architectural directions. You may have previously worked under a variety of different job titles within engineering and/or architecture, and you may have worked in a variety of organisational contexts. Whatever your past experience, it will have given you both technical breadth and depth.

You will be a problem‑solver who identifies risks, issues, gaps, and dependencies and takes ownership in bringing people together to find solutions. You will do this through your supportive, empathetic and collaborative behaviours, acting as coach, mentor, guide or constructive questioner as the situation demands. You are pragmatic but also mindful of the big picture, consciously balancing the immediate goals of teams against the long term direction for their products.

Our existing infrastructure includes both on‑premise High‑Performance Compute clusters and AWS, and our bioinformatics workflows are orchestrated in Python / Next Flow. We leverage best‑in‑class tools like Dragen to do some of the heavy‑lifting. We use things like Python, Mongo

DB and Dynamo

DB to deliver RESTful services that provide authoritative data for use during processing. We are working to become interoperable with the wider NHS via open standards like FHIR and GA4GH APIs. We have a standard tool chain which includes Terraform for infrastructure‑as‑code, Git Lab for source code and CI/CD, Artifactory for software artefacts and Data Dog for observability.

• Work alongside the service owner, architects, product managers, engineers, bioinformaticians and other subject matter experts to continuously evolve a roadmap for each programme.
• Be the voice of technical excellence in any conversation, ensuring that the functional, safety and operational characteristics of our products are continuously improving.
• Stay abreast of emerging technologies, standards and industry trends and incorporate them into our software development practices.
• Contribute to the wider conversation at Genomics England and help mature our technical practices.

• Strong software engineering skills and awareness of software design patterns (Python is our preferred development language)
• Knowledge of different database types and their applicability in different contexts (Postgres/Aurora, Elastic/Open Search and Apache Iceberg are in use at Genomics England)
• Experience shaping and guiding software architectural choices, both tactical as well as long‑term architectural strategy…