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 orchestration tools such as Dagster, Airflow, or Prefect.
- Experience working with external data suppliers, defining requirements, SLAs, and managing joint delivery.
- Understanding and working knowledge of information governance and data security approaches appropriate for sensitive health data.
Benefits
- Salary from £105,000 per annum.
- Generous Pension Scheme – We invest in your future with employer contributions of up to 12%.
- 30 Days Holiday + 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.
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]
