Job Specifications
This is a role where engineering leadership meets one of the most ambitious life‑science programmes in the world. At Our Future Health, we are building what will become one of the largest health cohorts that exists. We are already releasing data for nearly 2 million participants, including imputed genetic data for over 550,000 people, and aim to release data for up to 5 million participants.
As Engineering Manager for our Genetics Data Squad, you will guide multiple teams through a pivotal stage of growth, scaling systems that process petabytes of genotyped and imputed data. You will shape data flows and support the production of data releases that enable research for scientists across the globe. This is a space where R&D thrives, where we explore bleeding‑edge tooling and push the boundaries of what is possible. If you want to lead teams building innovative pipelines that will redefine how genetic data is processed at a population scale, then we want to hear from you.
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. We are a charity, supported by the UK Government, in partnership with charities and industry. We work closely with the NHS and with public authorities across all nations and regions of the UK.
Despite big improvements in healthcare in our lifetimes, today millions of people in the UK still live in poor health as they get older. 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.
What you'll be doing:
Leading and developing one or more engineering teams, supporting career growth, coaching, and creating a positive, high‑performing environment
Growing the team(s), hiring exceptional engineers and balancing permanent, contractor, and agency capacity to meet future needs
Owning engineering delivery, partnering with Product and cross‑functional teams to ship high‑value, high‑quality software while unblocking teams and enabling sustainable delivery at scale
Championing continuous improvement, helping squads evolve their ways of working and facilitating clear communication between technical and non‑technical stakeholders. Supporting teams in regularly reflecting on and evolving their ways of working. You can support or host difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders
Shaping the technology roadmap, contributing to decisions on platforms, tools, and engineering practices
Managing technical debt and delivery practices, ensuring teams prioritise effectively and use strong approaches to planning, forecasting, and flow
Guiding engineering decision‑making, supporting squads to evaluate options, reach consensus, and escalate for wider review when needed
Overseeing operations and incident management, ensuring robust runbooks, monitoring, and processes in partnership with Engineering, Data, InfoSec, and TechOps
Supporting compliance across the organisation, ensuring teams understand and meet policy, process, and control requirements
Staying ahead of industry best practice.
What you won't be doing:
Working in a siloed environment with no freedom to make decisions.
Working in a place where you can't see the impact your expertise makes.
Requirements
To succeed in this role you will be able to demonstrate some of the following skills and experience:
Excellent communicator able to bridge technical and non‑technical stakeholders and facilitate discussions across multidisciplinary teams
Proven stakeholder management skills, including interpreting needs, setting expectations, and navigating difficult conversations with senior audiences
Agile engineering experience, including GitHub, code review, unit testing, TDD, and CI/CD best practice
Proven line‑management and coaching experience within cross‑functional engineering teams
Working knowledge of information governance and data security, especially for sensitive health data
Operational experience managing live services: observability, logging, error reporting, debugging, and incident management (Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic)
High proficiency with JIRA, including sprint boards, timelines, metrics, queries, standards, and alerts; familiarity with tools like Asana or Trello
Hands‑on experience with genetic data, including genotyping or NGS data, bioinformatics formats (VCF, pVCF, BGEN) and tools (bcftools, PLINK)
Experience designing and deploying complex data schemas and working with large‑scale, reusable data products
Previous engineering experience in Python and Bash, with experience in data lakes, Spark, and Databricks
Previous engineering experience in orchestration, including Docker and Kubernetes
Cloud experience, ideally Azure, plus workflow orch