Software Development Project Lead Job Cambridge area,England UK,Software Development

Your role

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.

In this role you will

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

You will have

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

You will also have strong technical expertise in several of the following

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, deployment and engineering best practices
Significant experience leading software engineering teams and developing people

You may also have

Experience working with scientific data resources, bioinformatics or biological databases
Experience in scientific publishing, scholarly communications or research information systems
Experience developing systems that process terabyte-scale datasets
Experience with modern JavaScript frameworks such as Vue.js or React
Experience using high-performance or distributed computing environments, including Slurm
Experience supporting machine learning workflows or production ML pipelines
An interest in open science, scholarly communication and developing services that accelerate scientific discovery

At EMBL-EBI you will work in a highly collaborative international environment alongside software engineers, data scientists and researchers from around…