Engineering Lead — AI-Driven Biomedical Literature Platform

EMBL; Hinxton; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 72,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working patterns

Private medical insurance

30 days annual leave

Relocation package

Job summary

EMBL-EBI is seeking a Software Development Project Lead to guide Europe PMC’s engineering team. You will shape the technical strategy, lead backend and database developers, and collaborate with product, ML, and data science teams to extend literature discovery and AI-powered services.

You will drive Agile delivery, oversee data pipelines, and ensure production reliability while steering architectural decisions for global-scale infrastructure based at the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge.

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Collaborate with colleagues across EMBL-EBI and with international partners to deliver shared infrastructure and strategic initiatives.

Skills

Leadership

Agile methodologies

Stakeholder management

Communication

Mentoring

Education

Degree in Computer Science

Tools

Java and Spring

SQL/NoSQL (MongoDB)

Apache Solr/Lucene

RESTful & SOAP

Unix/Linux

Git/GitLab

JIRA

Job description

EMBL-EBI is seeking a Software Development Project Lead to guide Europe PMC’s engineering team. You will shape the technical strategy, lead backend and database developers, and collaborate with product, ML, and data science teams to extend literature discovery and AI-powered services.

You will drive Agile delivery, oversee data pipelines, and ensure production reliability while steering architectural decisions for global-scale infrastructure based at the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge.