Platform Engineer (we have office locations in Cambridge, Leeds & London)
Company Description
Genomics England partners with the NHS to provide whole genome sequencing diagnostics. We also equip researchers to find the causes of disease and develop new treatments – with patients and participants at the heart of it all.
Our mission is to continue refining, scaling, and evolving our ability to enable others to deliver genomic healthcare and conduct genomic research.
We are accelerating our impact and working with patients, doctors, scientists, government and industry to improve genomic testing, and help researchers access the health data and technology they need to make new medical discoveries and create more effective, targeted medicines for everybody.
Job Description
We’re on the lookout for a skilled Platform Engineer with a sharp eye for infrastructure, a problem-solving mindset, and ideally, a genuine interest in working with data at scale.
At Genomics England, our platform powers the secure movement and analysis of multi-petabyte genomic and healthcare datasets. From high-throughput data pipelines to orchestration, transfer and visualisation tooling, the infrastructure you’ll help build directly supports teams tackling some of the most important challenges in genomic medicine.
This is very much a hands-on engineering role, but the problems you’ll be solving are data-flavoured. Think performance tuning for data-heavy workflows, scaling secure cloud-native environments, improving observability across transfer pipelines, and enabling product teams to run faster without worrying about what’s underneath.
What you’ll be doing:
- Designing, building and maintaining cloud and on-prem infrastructure, with a focus on data-rich workloads
- Leading on CI/CD tooling and deployment automation for smoother, safer releases
- Supporting and optimising tooling such as Tableau, Prefect, Semarchy, Globus and Aspera
- Improving performance and reliability across our HPC clusters and storage-heavy infrastructure
- Building in observability - monitoring, alerting, logging - to stay ahead of issues
- Championing automation using Terraform, Python, Bash or similar
- Creating clean, useful technical documentation and enabling wider team knowledge
- Driving best practice DevOps and platform thinking in a collaborative, cross-functional setting
What you’ll bring:
- Solid AWS and Terraform (or equivalent IaC tooling) experience
- Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash or similar
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD tools like GitLab CI, Jenkins etc
- Understanding of how to support large-scale, data-intensive platforms
- A strong problem-solver who’s comfortable working across the stack
- Good communication skills and a collaborative approach
Bonus if you have:
- Experience managing high-volume data pipelines
- Familiarity with secure data handling in regulated or research settings
- Exposure to data visualisation, orchestration or MDM tooling
- Background in healthcare, genomics, or life sciences (not essential)
Qualifications
Qualifications are not mandatory, however AWS, Terraform, or Automation certifications are welcome and highly beneficial
Additional Information
Salary from: £71,500
Closing Date: Sunday 27th July at 23:00 (UK time)
Being an integral part of such a meaningful mission is extremely rewarding in itself, but in order to support our people, we’re continually improving our benefits package. We pride ourselves on investing in our people and supporting them to achieve their career goals, as well as offering a benefits package including:
- Generous Leave: 30 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, additional leave for long service, and the option to apply for up to 30 days of remote working abroad annually (approval required).
- Family-Friendly: Blended working arrangements, flexible working, enhanced maternity, paternity and shared parental leave benefits.
- Pension & Financial: Defined contribution pension (Genomics England double-matches up to 10%, however you can contribute more if you wish), Life Assurance (3x salary), and a Give As You Earn scheme.
- Learning & Development: Individual learning budgets, support for training and certifications, and reimbursement for one annual professional subscription (approval required).
- Recognition & Rewards: Employee recognition programme and referral scheme.
- Health & Wellbeing: Subsidised gym membership, a free Headspace account, and access to an Employee Assistance Programme, eye tests, flu jabs.
Equal opportunities and our commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace
Genomics England is actively committed to providing and supporting an inclusive environment that promotes equity, diversity and inclusion best practice both within our community and in any other area where we have influence. We are proud of our diverse community where everyone can come to work and feel welcomed and treated with respect regardless of any disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, or social background.
Genomics England’s policies of non-discrimination and equity and will be applied fairly to all people, regardless of age, disability, gender identity or reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, being pregnant or recently becoming a parent, race, religion or beliefs, sex or sexual orientation, length of service, whether full or part-time or employed under a permanent or a fixed-term contract or any other relevant factor.
Genomics England does not tolerate any form of discrimination, harassment, victimisation or bullying at work. Such behaviour is contrary to our virtues, undermines our mission and core values and diminishes the dignity, respect and integrity of all parties. Our People policies outline our commitment to inclusivity.
We aim to remove barriers in our recruitment processes and to be flexible with our interview processes. Should you require any adjustments that may help you to fully participate in the recruitment process, we encourage you to discuss this with us.
Blended working model
Genomics England operates a blended working model as we know our people appreciate the flexibility that hybrid working can bring. We expect most people to come into the office a minimum of 2 times each month. However, this will vary according to role and will be agreed with your team leader. There is no expectation that people will return to the office full time unless they want to, however, some of our roles require full time on site attendance e.g., lab teams, reception team.
Our teams and squads have, and will continue to reflect on what works best for them to work together successfully and have the freedom to design working patterns to suit, beyond the minimum. Our office locations are: Canary Wharf, Cambridge and Leeds.
Onboarding background checks
As part of our recruitment process, all successful candidates are subject to a Standard Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. We therefore require applicants to disclose any previous offences at point of application, as some unspent convictions may mean we are unable to proceed with your application due to the nature of our work in healthcare.
Thank you for applying for Platform Engineer (we have office locations in Cambridge, Leeds & London)
Your application has been submitted!
We will review your application as soon as possible.
For more information about the organisation please view our Genomics England Insights and Welcome Pack.
