Staff Software Engineer - Data Platforms

Our Future Health UK; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Our Future Health is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to shape and build shared engineering capabilities for our data platforms. This role blends hands-on software engineering with staff-level technical leadership to solve complex problems across large-scale data systems and reusable tooling.

As part of the Data Product squads, you will influence architectural decisions, guide engineering teams, and help create scalable, reusable capabilities shared across teams to accelerate discovery and

Qualifications

• Experience leading large-scale data systems.
• Proven ability to build scalable reusable engineering capabilities.
• Strong collaboration with product and engineering management.

Responsibilities

• Guide technical decisions with the squad's product manager and engineering manager.
• Represent technology in cross-functional project teams from ideation to implementation.
• Act as guiding mind for engineering/architecture with data leadership.
• Lead critical technical strategy and implementations affecting the business area.
• Carry out high-impact hands-on work where it makes sense.
• Work with partners to integrate external systems with Our Future Health.
• Support peers with pairing, reviews, and coaching to raise engineering standards.
• Participate in live operations rotations and on-call support.
• Anticipate pipeline problems and implement preventative solutions.

Skills

Hands-on software engineering

Technical leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Decision making

Job description

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help shape and build the shared engineering capabilities that underpin Our Future Health's data platforms.

This is an opportunity to combine hands‑on software engineering with Staff level technical leadership, working on large‑scale data systems and reusable tooling while helping multiple engineering teams solve complex problems effectively.

Our Future Health is 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 2.7M volunteers across the UK, we're now the world's biggest health research programme 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 web sites, clinics across the UK, secure analytics and research systems, and pipelines that process highly sensitive health and genetic data, and we are continuing to grow our engineering capability to support this ambition.

Our Data Product squads build and operate the technology that enables us to process and use large volumes of health and research data. As our engineering organisation evolves, we're looking for a Staff Software Engineer who can help us build scalable, reusable engineering capabilities that can be shared across these teams.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

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

• Guiding the technical decisions the team makes alongside the squad's product manager and engineering manager (EM).
• 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 the Head of Data Engineering and your peer Staff/Lead Engineers 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.
• Participate in live operations support rotations that monitor live systems and quickly and effectively react to potential incidents and provide support to operations teams such as customer support. This could include being part of an out of hours on‑call rotation.
• Anticipate problems that could occur with pipelines and take action to prevent them. Identify and describe problems when they occur and be able to develop solutions that address