Software Development Project Lead

Join EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and lead the engineering team behind one of the world's largest and most widely used biomedical literature resources.

As Software Development Project Lead, you will provide technical leadership for Europe PMC, a globally recognised open science platform used by millions of researchers every year.

You will lead a team of backend and database developers and work closely with the product team, machine learning engineers and data scientists to shape the next generation of literature discovery and AI-powered research services.

Working alongside the Literature Services Team Lead, Product Lead and Data Science Lead, you will help define the technical strategy for Europe PMC, ensuring the platform continues to scale while delivering innovative capabilities that support modern scientific research.

Europe PMC contains more than 11 million full-text articles and preprints, together with 45 million abstracts, enriched with citations, links to biological databases, persistent identifiers for people, organisations and grants, and state-of-the-art machine learning annotations.

The service is supported by 35 international biomedical research funders, serves 46 million unique users annually, and processes approximately 1.5 billion API requests every year.

Built primarily using Java and Spring, with SQL and No

SQL databases, large-scale Solr search infrastructure and high-throughput data pipelines, Europe PMC presents complex engineering challenges at global scale.

• Lead the technical development and long-term architecture of Europe PMC and associated services
• Define technical roadmaps to ensure the platform continues to scale in response to rapid growth in data volumes, AI capabilities and user demand
• Lead, mentor and develop a team of software engineers, supporting both delivery and career development
• Work across product, software engineering and data science teams to deliver new features and AI-enabled services
• Prioritise development work using Agile methodologies, balancing new functionality, operational stability and technical debt
• Oversee large-scale data ingestion and processing pipelines from multiple international content providers
• Ensure the reliability, performance and availability of Europe PMC's production services
• Contribute to software engineering best practice, architecture, resource planning and delivery processes
• Collaborate with colleagues across EMBL-EBI and with international partners to deliver shared infrastructure and strategic initiatives
• This is an opportunity to combine technical leadership, software engineering and people management while helping to build one of the world's most important resources for life science research.

• A degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience
• Experience managing technical delivery in Agile environments, including Scrum and Kanban
• Experience designing, building and operating large-scale, high-availability systems handling substantial data volumes and user traffic
• Experience managing software engineering projects from planning through delivery
• Experience recruiting, mentoring and supporting software engineers
• Strong stakeholder management skills, working effectively with both technical and non-technical collaborators
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative leadership style

• Java and Spring
• SQL and No
  
  SQL databases (including MongoDB)
• Apache Solr/Lucene and large-scale search systems
• RESTful and SOAP web services
• Unix/Linux environments and shell scripting
• Git/Git Lab and modern software development workflows
• JIRA or similar issue tracking systems
• Application performance optimisation, debugging and production support
• Software testing,…