Staff Engineer, Architect (Researcher Operations)

• We are looking for a Staff Engineer (Architect) to own the high-level design of our researcher operations systems
• As Our Future Health moves to expand its researcher offering we need to build and operate new systems related to acquiring researchers, onboarding them, taking them through the study application process, and maintaining our relationship with them
• The role will require working with other functions at Our Future Health such as Finance, Customer Support, and we expect it to involve a mixture of bespoke building of select components alongside configuration and integration of SaaS products like CRM, ticketing, support, and email comms systems
• Where we build our own components you will work with product development squads to define the design and requirements for the component and then support the squad as they build it
• The researcher onboarding and study application processes are vitally important to Our Future Health since they form our implementation of two principles from the “Five Safes” framework for safe research access to data - “safe people” and “safe projects”
• As well as the responsibilities specific to the researcher operations area, as a member of the Architecture team you will also play a key role in general architecture activities at Our Future Health - working with other engineers to guide the wider platform design, work on cross-platform projects which add new platform-side capabilities, represent technology in the early stages of future projects, and so on
• Day to day work will vary depending on what your focus is at that time, but will include things like:
• 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 your peer staff engineers and Head of Engineering 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
• Contribute to the reliability, resilience and ongoing evolution of critical research platform services and live systems where required

Benefits

• 30 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Generous company pension package with employer contributions of up to 12%
• We have a lovely new office in Holborn, Central London and we offer flexible and remote working arrangements.
• We offer all employees a life assurance policy.
• Training support to help you achieve your potential.
• All employees are covered by a group income protection scheme to support them in the event of long term sickness.- Understanding of the importance of operational, security and legal factors when designing solutions, with the ability to articulate trade-offs and make informed decisions around design and technology choices
• Knowledge and experience of building cloud-hosted consumer web applications and backend services using open source technologies such as Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Python in a start-up or scale-up environment
• Comfortable in facilitating technical discussions, encouraging collaboration and providing direction
• Knowledge of good data modelling and design patterns; in-depth knowledge of relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL) and familiarity other types of data store (blob, document, graph)
• Appreciation of the balance between “build” and “buy”, experience of weighing up pros and cons to make a selection which will fit into the wider organisation’s systems and meet the needs of organisational internal users and goals
• Experience working in small, growing organisations with a high degree of ambiguity, where flexibility is valued
• Comfortable working with Infrastructure as Code, ideally with knowledge of Terraform
• Expertise in modern, agile development practices like code review, TDD, CI/CD and pairing using tools like Git and GitHub
• Experience in mentoring and coaching less experienced engineers
• Experience of working with sensitive personal data
• Experience working in/with cross-functional teams consisting of engineers, product, UX and non-technical stakeholders
• Proven ability to communicate with stakeholders and audiences at different levels
• Experience of configuring and integrating off-the-shelf SaaS systems with bespoke web and backend applications, via APIs, event-driven architectures, etc
• Strong understanding of software quality principles and practices
• Prior experience with Azure (ideally), AWS or GCP
• Experience of operationally managing software components once live, including; observability, logging, metrics, error reporting, debugging and live incident management
• You have led the architectural design of systems
• We welcome applications from all who may not feel they match the full criteria, so if you have most of the below, we’d like to hear from you- We recommend you apply as soon as possible as occasionally due to high volumes of applications, we need to close our postings early