Hybrid Senior Backend Software Engineer – Pathogen

at Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford

• Job title: Senior Backend Software Engineer – Pathogen
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Cloud, Django, Docker, GraphQL, Kafka, Kubernetes, Node.js, Oracle, Postgres, Python, SQL
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Oxford, United Kingdom

About the role

• Senior Backend Software Engineer developing backend services for the Pathogen project at the Ellison Institute. Collaborating with cross-functional teams for bioinformatics and data solutions.

Responsibilities

• **Key responsibilities include:**
• Designing, developing, and maintaining high-performance, scalable, and secure backend services and APIs using technologies such as Python and NodeJS.
• Collaborating with science teams, full stack engineers, and data engineers to understand data requirements and integrate user needs into backend services.
• Building and maintaining RESTful APIs to surface data in the platform, ensuring it is findable and accessible in line with FAIR principles.
• Developing APIs that support future interoperability and federation for pathogen diagnostics, epidemiology monitoring, and research.
• Working with data engineers to build pipelines and processes that store and transform platform data for easy consumption.
• Implementing and managing data storage solutions including data lakes, data warehouses, and databases such as object storage, Oracle Autonomous Database, and PostgreSQL.
• Supporting innovation efforts by exploring new technologies such as vector databases to enable search and AI use cases.
• Using big data technologies like Kafka, Iceberg, and Parquet, along with managed databases including PostgreSQL and Oracle vector databases.
• Operating, monitoring, and maintaining Oracle Cloud infrastructure to ensure backend services are highly available, scalable, and secure.
• Collaborating with DevSecOps engineers to automate deployments and follow best-practice CI/CD.
• Documenting and communicating APIs to engineers and bioinformaticians to support pipeline development and user-facing data products.
• Promoting clean, standardized, maintainable, testable, and reusable code through technical standards.
• Ensuring solutions are documented and aligned with architecture governance processes.
• Implementing monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to maintain platform health and performance.
• Line managing and supporting the development of a high-performing team of backend engineers focused on the data platform.

Requirements

• **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 such as Python, NodeJS, Django, and FastAPI.
• Experience building flexible APIs using GraphQL.
• Expertise in at least one cloud platform and its managed data services.
• Familiarity with big data technologies such as Parquet, Iceberg, and streaming platforms like Kafka.
• Strong knowledge of database systems, SQL data model design, and query optimization.
• Experience with containerization using Kubernetes and Docker.
• Proven ability to deliver scalable and performant data services using microservice architectures.
• Experience developing scalable architectures using containerized and serverless approaches such as Oracle Functions and AWS Lambda.
• Team management experience and a track record of fostering a collaborative, high-performance culture.
• Understanding of Agile methodologies and sprint-based workflows.
• Commitment to knowledge sharing.
• **Desirable knowledge, skills, and experience:**
• Knowledge of genomics.
• Experience with Oracle OCI.
• Understanding of federation standards for genomics such as GA4GH.
• Familiarity with healthcare clinical data and standards such as OMOP and SNOMED.

Benefits

• **We offer the following salary and benefits:**
• Enhanced holiday pay
• Pension
• Life Assurance
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance
• Hospital Cash Plan
• Therapy Services
• Perk Box
• Electrical Car Scheme