Principal Engineer – TRE, Data Architecture

Role Overview

• Work with technology and organisational leadership on long-term strategic initiatives, helping shape the future evolution of Our Future Health’s Trusted Research Environment (TRE) and wider research platform capabilities.
• Provide technical leadership across complex areas including trusted research environments, secure data platforms, health data, governance, privacy and regulated research environments.
• Contribute to organisation-wide technical roadmaps and cross-team initiatives, helping teams deliver scalable, secure and researcher-focused platform capabilities.
• Lead and contribute to technical decisions with significant architectural impact across the TRE, data platform and wider technology ecosystem.
• Represent Our Future Health externally with partners, suppliers and the wider health research and technology community.
• Identify and deliver high-impact technical and architectural work where hands-on leadership is needed, particularly around platform design, integration and data architecture challenges at scale.
• Work closely with vendors and partners to integrate external systems, services and research tooling into the Our Future Health platform and TRE ecosystem.
• Support and mentor engineers through collaboration, technical guidance, peer review and architectural coaching, helping maintain high engineering standards across the organisation.
• Contribute to the reliability, resilience and ongoing evolution of critical research platform services and live systems where required.

Requirements

• Ideally familiar with how trusted research environments / secure data environments work.
• Deep experience using a broad range of cloud storage services and technologies.
• Familiarity with how Platform-as-a-Service systems work, including running third-party code and tools on shared compute and storage infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of data access security and governance practices.
• Understanding of health data research tools and technologies such as data browsers, Jupyter notebooks and R.
• Desirable: understanding of tools and technologies related to working with genetic data.
• Understanding of LLMs and how they may be deployed or used within user-facing environments.
• Experience leading or contributing to the architectural design of complex software systems.
• Strong technical expertise across relevant technologies and domains.
• Comfortable working with Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience working in a technical leadership role within modern agile development teams, using practices such as code review, TDD, CI/CD and pairing using tools like Git and GitHub.
• Experience operating and managing live software systems, including observability, logging, metrics, error reporting, debugging and incident management.
• Comfortable working with partner organisations and stakeholders across technical and non-technical teams.
• Experience with vendor selection processes, including writing RFPs, working with potential vendors and vendor evaluation.
• Experience working across cross-functional teams consisting of engineering, product, UX and operational stakeholders.
• Experience leading or coordinating work across multiple teams to deliver shared objectives.
• Comfortable facilitating complex technical discussions with organisation-wide impact, encouraging collaboration and providing direction where needed.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to engage effectively with stakeholders and audiences at different levels, including executive leadership (CTO, CPO and similar).
• Knowledge and experience of applying operational, security and legal considerations when designing solutions, particularly within regulated or sensitive data environments, with the ability to articulate trade-offs and make informed technical decisions.
• Experience working in small, growing organisations with ambiguity, where flexibility is valued.
• Strong understanding of software quality and experience driving quality improvement initiatives across multiple teams.
• Experience mentoring engineers at different stages of their careers.

Tech Stack

• Cloud

Benefits

• Competitive base salary from £120,000
• 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
• EV Scheme – Save up to 40% on a brand new electric vehicle all-inclusive package 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