Backend Software Engineer: Health Data Platform

Newcastle University; Newcastle upon Tyne; On-site; GBP 32,000 - 35,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous holiday allowance

Pension schemes

Health & wellbeing initiatives

Job summary

Newcastle University is recruiting a Software Engineer for the NIHR Innovation Observatory (IO) to help build OpenScan, a cloud-based data platform for health innovation data. You will work in a small, agile team focused on ingestion, processing, and backend integration, contributing to national health policy insights.

You will liaise with Lead Software Engineer and Technical Project Manager to advance OpenScan’s core infrastructure while learning and applying modern tech stacks and best coding

Qualifications

• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science or related field.
• Proficient in Python and able to build real-world applications.
• Experience with web scraping, data processing, or similar workflows.
• Familiarity with version control (Git/GitHub) and collaborative development.
• Working knowledge of cloud environments (ideally AWS).
• Strong attention to code quality, testing, and documentation.
• Willingness to learn and work across backend and infrastructure layers.
• Awareness of good project management practices (Agile, Kanban).
• Experience in research and innovation, public sector, or data-intensive environments.
• Familiarity with Atlas Search, Elasticsearch and/or search engine design.
• Exposure to frontend frameworks (React, Streamlit) and Django templating.
• Interest in large language models and AI toolchains.
• Experience with health or policy-related data workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend features in Python as part of OpenScan’s core infrastructure.
• Contribute to ingestion, crawling, and data processing pipelines.
• Work with NoSQL databases (MongoDB) and version control (GitHub).
• Help shape and improve coding practices as the platform matures.
• Collaborate with internal users to refine data flows and backend functionality.
• Support integration with frontend applications and API endpoints.
• Contribute to continuous delivery through a Kanban-based workflow.
• Learn and engage with evolving stack, including generative AI and modular app development.

Skills

Python

Web scraping

GitHub

AWS

Testing & docs

Agile/Kanban

Research/data workflows

Education

Undergraduate degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

MongoDB

Elasticsearch

Atlas Search

React

Streamlit

Django

Job description

Newcastle University is recruiting a Software Engineer for the NIHR Innovation Observatory (IO) to help build OpenScan, a cloud-based data platform for health innovation data. You will work in a small, agile team focused on ingestion, processing, and backend integration, contributing to national health policy insights.

You will liaise with Lead Software Engineer and Technical Project Manager to advance OpenScan’s core infrastructure while learning and applying modern tech stacks and best coding