Backend Software Engineer - Pathogen

Led by a world-class faculty of scientists, technologists, policy makers, economists and entrepreneurs, the Ellison Institute of Technology aims to develop and deploy commercially sustainable solutions to solve some of humanity’s most enduring challenges. Our work is guided by four Humane Endeavours:
Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology, Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture, Climate Change & Managing Atmospheric CO2 and Artificial Intelligence & Robotics.

Set for completion in 2027, the EIT Campus in Littlemore will include more than 300,000 sq ft of research laboratories, educational and gathering spaces. Fuelled by growing ambition and the strength of Oxford’s science ecosystem, EIT is now expanding its footprint to a 2 million sq ft Campus across the western part of The Oxford Science Park. Designed by Foster + Partners led by Lord Norman Foster, this will become a transformative workplace for up to 7,000 people, with autonomous laboratories, purpose-built laboratories including a plant sciences building and dynamic spaces to spark interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Pathogen Mission highlights EIT’s transformative approach, using Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) and Oracle’s cloud technology to create a global pathogen metagenomics system. This initiative aims to improve diagnostics, provide early epidemic warnings, and guide treatments by profiling antimicrobial resistance. The goal is to deliver certified diagnostic tools for widespread use in labs, hospitals, and public health.

EIT Oxford fosters a culture of collaboration, innovation, and resilience, valuing diverse expertise to drive sustainable solutions to humanity’s enduring challenges.

Backend Software Engineer to build platform services that store and make data accessible within our platform. In this role, you will design and implement robust, resilient backend services, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.

You’ll work closely with a cross-functional team, including architects, platform engineers, and data engineers to create infrastructure that enables EIT’s scientists to easily find and access the data they need for groundbreaking bioinformatics pipelines and data products.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain highly performant, scalable, and secure backend services and APIs using technologies such as Python and NodeJS.
• Collaborate with science teams, full-stack engineers, and data engineers to understand data requirements and integrate user needs into backend data services.
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs to make platform data findable and accessible in line with FAIR principles.
• Build APIs that support interoperability and federation for pathogen clinical diagnostics, epidemiology monitoring, and research.
• Work with data engineers to create pipelines and processes for storing and transforming platform data for easy consumption.
• Implement and manage data storage solutions, including data lakes, data warehouses, and databases (e.g., object storage, Oracle Autonomous Database, Postgre
  
  SQL).
• Support innovation by exploring new technologies such as vector databases for search and AI use cases.
• Work with big data technologies like Kafka, Iceberg, and Parquet, as well as managed database technologies such as Postgre
  
  SQL and Oracle vector databases.
• Operate, monitor, and maintain Oracle Cloud infrastructure to ensure backend services are highly available, scalable, and secure.
• Collaborate with Dev Sec Ops  engineers to automate deployments and adopt best-practice CI/CD.
• Document and communicate APIs to engineers and bioinformaticians so they can build pipelines and user-facing data products effectively.
• Provide technical standards for backend engineers to deliver clean, standardized, maintainable, testable, and reusable code.
• Ensure solutions are documented and aligned with defined architecture governance processes.
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to maintain platform health and performance.

Essential Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

• Proven experience as a backend cloud engineer, data engineer, or similar role.
• Proficiency in backend programming languages and API frameworks (Python, NodeJS, Django, FastAPI).
• Experi…