Our Future Health will be the UK's largest ever health research programme, bringing people together to develop new ways to detect, prevent, and treat diseases. Diseases like cancer, dementia, diabetes, and heart disease affect the lives of many people in our communities. Our goal is to create a world‑leading resource for health research, to improve our understanding and spot the patterns of how and why common diseases start, so treatments can begin sooner and be more effective.
Our plan is to bring together 5 million volunteers from all across the UK who will be asked to contribute information to help build one of the most detailed pictures we have ever had of people's health. Researchers will be able to use this information to make new discoveries about human health and disease so future generations can live in good health for longer.
Senior Data Engineer
We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to bring an in‑depth knowledge of health and survey data and data solutions to help solve some of the key challenges around a programme of work at industrial scale with global significance.
Responsibilities
- Write and contribute code to a complex code base responsible for delivering data to researchers on an industrial scale.
- Work with health records to build pipelines and systems to process it, control quality and create data releases for researchers.
- Support the build of data pipelines from data providers to our primary data store and trusted research environment.
- Produce logic for data transformation steps as code, which meets the requirements for our end users and builds well‑curated, accessible and quality‑controlled data for analysis.
- Contribute to code base for multiple data pipelines while ensuring best coding practices are used.
- Work with data scientists and epidemiologists to understand the data requirements and deliver the data needed for their projects.
- Keep abreast of best practice in data engineering across industry, research and government and facilitate the adoption of standards.
Requirements
- Experience building and maintaining robust, scalable and efficient data pipelines.
- Can listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders and interpret them, effectively managing stakeholder expectations.
- Experience working with health data (ideally NHS or survey/questionnaire data). Experience with secondary care datasets (Hospital Episodes Statistics, Death registry data, A&E data, etc.) as well as Primary care (GP data) would be advantageous. Experience with survey/questionnaire data and standards (REDCap) would be advantageous.
- Highly proficient in Python with solid command line knowledge and Unix skills.
- Good understanding of cloud environments (ideally Azure), distributed computing and optimisation of workflows and pipelines.
- Understanding of common data transformation and storage formats, e.g. Apache Parquet, Delta tables.
- Understanding of containerisation (e.g. Docker) and deployment (e.g. Kubernetes).
- Experience with Spark, Databricks, data lakes.
- Follow best practices like code review, clean code and unit tests.
- Experience working in an agile development team. Familiar with version control and Git/GitHub.
- Awareness of data standards such as GA4GH and FAIR.
Benefits
- Salary from £74,000.
- Generous Pension Scheme – employer contributions of up to 12%.
- 30 days holiday pro‑rated + bank holidays.
- Enhanced parental leave.
- Cycle to Work Scheme – save 25–39% on a new bike and accessories through salary sacrifice.
- Home & tech savings – up to 8% off on IKEA and Currys products, spread over 12 months through salary sacrifice.
- £1,000 Employee Referral Bonus.
- Wellbeing support – access to Mental Health First Aiders, 24/7 online GP services and an Employee Assistance Programme.
- A great place to work – central London office in Holborn with flexible and remote working arrangements.
You may work remotely from anywhere within the UK, with occasional travel to London.
Closing date for applications: 12th November.
We recommend you apply as soon as possible as occasionally due to high volumes of applications, we need to close our postings early.
At Our Future Health, we recognise the importance of having a diverse workforce and ensuring that all candidates, regardless of their background, have equitable access to our application process. We proactively encourage applicants who identify as having a disability, neurodiversity, or long‑term health conditions to let us know if they require any reasonable adjustments as part of their application process.
If you do require any reasonable adjustments, please email us at
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