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 2.5M 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, pipelines that process highly sensitive health and genetic data, and we are continuing to grow our engineering capability to support this ambition.
We are looking for an experienced Director of Engineering to lead and scale our Software and Data Engineering organisation. This is a rare opportunity to apply modern, cloud-native engineering at national scale to a mission that genuinely improves lives.
This is a Senior Leadership role reporting to the CTO, where you will be accountable for scaling and strengthening software and data engineering across Our Future Health. The role exists to ensure we can deliver predictably at scale, operate highly reliable, secure systems, and grow a healthy, high-performing engineering organisation as the team scales significantly from 50 engineers. You will lead through 4 experienced Heads of Engineering and Data Engineering and work closely with peers across architecture, data, platform engineering, security, technical operations, product and delivery.
This role is people and operations focused with a strong emphasis on people leadership and team culture (across both software and data engineering). You will ensure our engineering teams can deliver predictably, operate and scale resilient and secure systems, and grow sustainably.
What makes this exciting?
- We are a UK-based charity with what’s now the world’s largest health research programme, powered by a fast-paced, highly skilled technology organisation running on a modern stack. With significant funding and partnerships across government, NHS, health charities and life sciences companies, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create lasting change. This is Tech for Good at scale.
- We work in a multi-disciplinary way, bringing engineering together not just with design and product but also with science, ethics, security and clinical expertise.
- We’re building for the long term, to power health research for decades to come.
- And we’re not short of technology challenges to inspire engineers and engineering leaders: we’ll be scaling data and genomics processing into the hundreds of petabytes, building systems to dramatically increase clinical trials participation in the UK, providing health insights to millions of people in partnership with the NHS, maintaining a strong cybersecurity and privacy posture and continuing to support the growth of what will be the largest, most diverse cohort of volunteers who have ever participated in health research.
Responsibilities
Engineering Leadership & Delivery
- Lead multiple squads operating in a full-service ownership (“you build it, you run it”) model
- Ensure predictable, high-quality delivery in partnership with product and delivery leaders
- Drive cross-team coordination on complex or high-risk initiatives
Operations & Reliability
- Own the availability, reliability and operational performance of systems built by our squads
- Define and embed effective incident management, on-call and post-incident learning practices
- Foster a blameless culture of learning and continuous improvement
People & Organisation
- Lead and coach senior engineering leaders, building a healthy leadership pipeline
- Define and continuously improve engineering people processes (hiring, onboarding, performance, development)
- Build an inclusive, high-trust engineering culture aligned to our mission
Strategy & Collaboration
- Translate organisational strategy into clear engineering priorities and OKRs
- Work closely with the Director of Architecture on longer-term technical direction and roadmap, and with the Chief Data Officer on data engineering capability and career progression
- Own engineering budgets, including headcount, contractors, agencies and partners
Requirements
- Experience leading large engineering organisations (100+ people) across multiple squads
- Proven ability to manage senior engineering leaders and operate effectively through multiple leadership layers
- Experience working with data engineering teams, ideally in environments dealing with large-scale, sensitive or scientific datasets (e.g., genomics, health records or other sensitive personal data)
- Strong track record of scaling engineering teams, including planning, hiring, and contractor/agency management
- Credibility leading cloud-native, data-intensive, high-availability software engineering organisations
- Demonstrated delivery leadership in modern agile, squad-based or full-service ownership models, with ownership of reliability, on-call and incident management
- Experience operating in highly regulated or security-conscious environments, embedding secure-by-design practices
- Evidence of improving engineering effectiveness at scale (e.g. OKRs, tooling, developer experience), and recent experience leading teams using AI tools for software development
- Strong cross-functional leadership, partnering closely with product, data, delivery and security teams
- A track record of building inclusive, high-performing engineering cultures and developing engineering talent
Although not essential, these would be very helpful:
- Background in Health Tech, Genomics / Bioinformatics, Tech Bio, Digital Health or similar domains
- Visible thought leadership in external engineering communities
Benefits
- Generous Pension Scheme – We invest in your future with employer contributions of up to 12%
- 30 Days Holiday pro rata + Bank Holidays – Enjoy a generous holiday allowance with the flexibility to take bank holidays when it suits you
- Enhanced Parental Leave – Supporting you during life’s biggest moments
- Cycle to Work Scheme – Save 25-39% on a new bike and accessories through salary sacrifice
- Home & Tech Savings – Get up to 8% off on IKEA and Currys products, spreading the cost over 12 months through salary sacrifice
- £1,000 Employee Referral Bonus – Know someone amazing? Get rewarded for bringing them on board!
- Wellbeing Support – Access to Mental Health First Aiders, plus 24/7 online GP services and an Employee Assistance Programme for you and your family
- A Great Place to Work – We have a lovely Central London office in Holborn, and offer flexible and remote working arrangements
Join us - let’s prevent disease together.
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 [email protected]
