Staff Engineer; Architect - Researcher Operations

Our Future Healthis 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’renow the world’s biggest health researchprogramme of its kind, and our volunteer group is also more diverse than other, similar health research programmes.

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 research 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.

Day to day work will vary depending on what your focus is at that time, but will include things like:

• Represent technology/architecture/engineering in cross‑functional project teams throughout a project’s lifecycle (from ideation to implementation). Work within the team to identify optimal solutions for challenges, communicate them outwards to stakeholders and work with others to implement them.
• Work with your peer staff engineers and Head of Engineering to act as a guiding mind for the engineering/architecture in your business area. Identify areas for improvement and work with other leaders to implement.
• 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 that help everyone reach high standards and result in the delivery of high‑quality software products.
• Contribute to the reliability, resilience and ongoing evolution of critical research platform services and live systems where required.

We welcome applications from all who may not feel they match the full criteria, so if you have most of the below, we’d like to hear from you:

• 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, event‑driven architectures, etc.
• Appreciation of the balance between “build” and “buy”, experience of weighing up pros and cons to make a selection…