Principal Engineer - Data (12m FTC)

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.

We are seeking a Principal Engineer with expertise in data engineering and data architectures such as Lakehouse, Data lake, and large Data warehouses.

As a Principal Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring the successful technical delivery of products and services. You will be responsible in leading the design and implementation of a scalable data layer infrastructure that empowers our organisation to extract insights from diverse data sets, including the structured clinical data and unstructured genomics and other omics data.

You will collaborate closely with your teams, contributing your expertise to plan effectively and achieve technical excellence. As hands-on leaders, you will guide problem-solving efforts, mentor team members, and shape the necessary skills within multiple squads.

Alongside Product Managers and subject matter experts, you will help define deliverable roadmaps and ensure adherence to agile principles, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Please note, this is a 12 month Fixed Term Contract.

Skills & Responsibilities

• Contribute to designing and delivering a data lakehouse infrastructure tailored to our unique data needs, leveraging a query layer for seamless interrogation and integration of diverse data with unified APIs
• Strong understanding of ETL processes and tools for data integration and transformation within data lakehouse, data lake, or data warehouse environments
• Proficiency in designing and optimising data architectures for efficient storage, retrieval, and analysis of structured and unstructured data
• Experience in building and maintaining data architectures that enable data ingestion, storage, and processing of diverse data types such as structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data
• Support the configuration of API data layers to enable easy integration with applications and efficient data analysis
• Strong understanding of architecture, governance and formal review in design and direction setting
• Leadership skills with a temperament that leads to cohesion within and across squads through open communication
• Able to navigate rapidly to effective solutions through active listening, clarity of thought, clear documentation, and succinct presentation
• Cloud-first approach to design with strong knowledge of AWS
• Experience in managing large datasets

Ideally, you will also possess knowledge of the following technologies: Search and indexing technology (e.g., Solr/Lucene, Elastic Search), data warehouse technologies (Dremio, Apache Iceberg), knowledge graphs. Plus data engineering tools and technologies, such as Python, SQL, Spark, Hadoop, and ETL frameworks.

Degree or equivalent experience.

Salary from: £103,000

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:

• 30 days’ holiday (plus bank holidays), with additional days for long service awards
• A generous pension scheme of up to 15% combined contribution
• Life Assurance (3 x salary)
• Individual learning budgets for every colleague, a Blinkist account and a wide variety of courses on our portal
• A wide variety of wellness benefits including Gympass, a Headspace account, free weekly Yoga classes
• Enhanced maternity & paternity benefits
• Blended working arrangements

Talk to our Talent Team and find out how a career with Genomics England will benefit you.

#LI-Hybrid

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.

Genomics England operates a blended working model as we know our people appreciate the flexibility. We expect most people to come into the office 2 times each month as a minimum. However, this will vary according to role and will be agreed with your team leader. There is no expectation that staff will return to the office full time unless they want to, however, some of our roles require you to be on site full time 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.

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.