Backend Software Engineer - Pathogen

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we’re on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you’ll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society. Explore more at www.eit.org.

Welcome to the Pathogen Project:

Within this ecosystem, the Pathogen Project exemplifies EIT’s dedication to ground-breaking science. It seeks to transform pathogen risk management, detection and response by leveraging Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS)-based metagenomic and pathogen-specific analytical tools. The goal is to power metagenomic devices using long-read sequencing technologies by building a comprehensive database of pathogen information to inform response. Enabled by Oracle Inc.’s cloud-computing scale and security, the Pathogen Project is advancing toward certified diagnostic tools for deployment in laboratories, hospitals, and public health organisations worldwide.

Your Role:

At EIT we are seeking an experienced and detailed orientated Backend Software Engineer to build platform services that store and make data accessible within our platform. In this role, you will design and implement robust, resilient backend services, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.

You’ll work closely with a cross-functional team, including architects, platform engineers, and data engineers to create infrastructure that enables EIT’s scientists to easily find and access the data they need for groundbreaking bioinformatics pipelines and data products.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain highly performant, scalable, and secure backend services and APIs using technologies such as Python and NodeJS.
• Collaborate with science teams, full-stack engineers, and data engineers to understand data requirements and integrate user needs into backend data services.
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs to make platform data findable and accessible in line with FAIR principles.
• Build APIs that support interoperability and federation for pathogen clinical diagnostics, epidemiology monitoring, and research.
• Work with data engineers to create pipelines and processes for storing and transforming platform data for easy consumption.
• Implement and manage data storage solutions, including data lakes, data warehouses, and databases (e.g., object storage, Oracle Autonomous Database, PostgreSQL).
• Support innovation by exploring new technologies such as vector databases for search and AI use cases.
• Work with big data technologies like Kafka, Iceberg, and Parquet, as well as managed database technologies such as PostgreSQL and Oracle vector databases.
• Operate, monitor, and maintain Oracle Cloud infrastructure to ensure backend services are highly available, scalable, and secure.
• Collaborate with DevSecOps engineers to automate deployments and adopt best-practice CI/CD.
• Document and communicate APIs to engineers and bioinformaticians so they can build pipelines and user-facing data products effectively.
• Provide technical standards for backend engineers to deliver clean, standardized, maintainable, testable, and reusable code.
• Ensure solutions are documented and aligned with defined architecture governance processes.
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to maintain platform health and performance.

Requirements:
Essential Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

• Proven experience as a backend cloud engineer, data engineer, or similar role.
• Proficiency in backend programming languages and API frameworks (Python, NodeJS, Django, FastAPI).
• Experience building flexible APIs using GraphQL.
• Expertise in at least one cloud platform and its related managed data services.
• Familiarity with big data technologies (Parquet, Iceberg) and streaming platforms (Kafka).
• Strong knowledge of database systems, SQL data model design, and query optimization.
• Experience with containerization (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Ability to deliver scalable, performant data services using microservice architectures.
• Proven experience developing architectures using containerization and serverless approaches (Oracle Functions, AWS Lambda).
• Experience managing teams and fostering a high-performance, collaborative culture.
• Understanding of Agile practices and sprint-based methodology.
• Ability to actively contribute to knowledge sharing.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

• Knowledge of genomics.
• Experience with Oracle OCI.
• Understanding of federation standards for genomics (GA4GH).
• Experience with healthcare clinical data and associated standards (OMOP, SNOMED).

Key Attributes

• Strong collaboration skills.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills.
• Willingness to learn and upskill in new technologies.

• Hands-on approach to exploring new technologies and developing POCs

Benefits:
We offer the following benefits:

• Enhanced holiday pay
• Pension
• Life Assurance
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance
• Hospital Cash Plan
• Therapy Services
• Perk Box
• Electrical Car Scheme

Working Together – What It Involves:

• You must have the right to work permanently in the UK with a willingness to travel as necessary. In certain cases, we can consider sponsorship, and this will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
• You will live in, or within easy commuting distance of, Oxford (or be willing to relocate).