Director of Engineering

Our Future Healthis an ambitious collaboration between the public charity and private sectors designed tohelp people live healthier lives for longer through better prevention earlierdetectionand improved treatment of diseases. We will speed up the discovery of new methods of early disease detection and the evaluation of new diagnostic tools to helpidentifyand treat diseases earlywhen outcomes are usually better. With over 2.5M volunteers across the UK were now the worlds biggest health research programme of its kind and our volunteer group is also more diverse than other similar health research programmes.

Technology and data are central to our systems power web sites clinics across the UKsecureanalyticsand researchsystemspipelines thatprocesshighly sensitivehealthand geneticdata and we are continuing to grow our engineering capability to support this ambition.

We are looking for an experiencedDirector of Engineeringto lead and scale ourSoftware andDataEngineering organisation.This is a rare opportunity to apply modern cloud-native engineering at national scale to a mission that genuinely improves lives.

This is a Senior Leadership role reporting to the CTO where you will be accountable for scaling and strengthening software and data engineering across Our Future Health. The role exists to ensure we can deliver predictably at scale operate highly reliable secure systems and grow a healthy high-performing engineering organisation as the team scales significantly from 50 engineers. You will lead through 4 experienced Heads of Engineering and Data Engineering and work closely with peers across architecture data platform engineering security technical operations product and delivery.

This role is people and operations focused with a strong emphasis on people leadership and team culture (across both software and data engineering). You will ensure our engineering teams can deliver predictably operate and scale resilient and secure systems and grow sustainably.

What makes thisexciting

• We are aUK-based charity withwhats now theworlds largest health research programmepowered by a fast-pacedhighly skilledtechnologyorganisation running on a modern significant funding and partnerships across government NHS healthcharitiesand life sciences companies we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunityto create lasting is Tech for Good at scale.
• We work inamulti-disciplinaryway bringingengineering together not just with designandproduct but also withscience ethicssecurityand clinicalexpertise.
• Werebuilding for thelong term to power health research for decades to come.
• And were not short oftechnology challengesto inspire engineers and engineering leaders:well bescaling data and genomics processing into the hundreds of petabytesbuilding systems to dramatically increase clinical trials participation in the UK providing health insights to millions of people in partnership with the NHS maintaining a strong cybersecurity and privacy posture and continuing tosupport the growth of what will bethe largest most diverse cohort of volunteerswho have ever participated in health research.

Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• Lead multiple squadsoperatingin a full-service ownership (you build it you run it) model
• Ensure predictable high-quality delivery in partnership with product and delivery leaders
• Drive cross-team coordination on complex or high-risk initiatives

Operations & Reliability

• Own the availability reliability and operational performance of systems built by our squads
• Define and embed effective incident management on-calland post-incident learning practices
• Foster a blameless culture of learning and continuous improvement

People & Organisation

• Lead and coach senior engineering leaders building a healthy leadership pipeline
• Define and continuously improve engineering people processes (hiring onboarding performance development)
• Build an inclusive high-trust engineering culture aligned to our mission

Strategy & Collaboration

• Translate organisational strategy into clear engineering priorities and OKRs
• Work closely with the Director of Architecture on longer-term technical direction and roadmap and withthe Chief Data Officer on data engineering capability and career progression
• Own engineering budgets including headcount contractorsagenciesand partners

• Experience leadinglarge engineering organisations (100 people)across multiple squads
• Proven ability tomanage senior engineering leadersandoperateeffectively through multiple leadership layers
• Experience working withdata engineering teamsideally inenvironments dealing with large-scalesensitiveor scientific datasets (e.g. genomics healthrecordsor other sensitive personal data)
• Strongtrack recordofscaling engineering teams including planning hiring and contractor/agency management
• Credibility leadingcloud-native data-intensive high-availabilitysoftware engineering organisations
• Demonstrated delivery leadership inmodern agile squad-basedor full-service ownershipmodels with ownership of reliability on-calland incident management
• Experienceoperatinginhighly regulated or security-conscious environments embedding secure-by-design practices
• Evidence of improvingengineering effectiveness at scale(e.g. OKRs tooling developer experience)andrecent experience leading teams usingAI tools for software development
• Strongcross-functional leadership partnering closely with product datadeliveryand security teams
• A track recordof buildinginclusive high-performing engineering culturesand developing engineering talent

Althoughnot essentialthese would bevery helpful:

• Background inHealthTechGenomics/ BioinformaticsTechBio DigitalHealthor similardomains
• Visiblethoughtleadershipinexternalengineering communities

• 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 lifes 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
• 1000 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 AssistanceProgrammefor 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 -letsprevent disease together.

We recommend you apply as soon as possible as occasionally due to high volumes ofapplicationswe need to close our postings early.

At Our Future Health werecognisethe importance of having a diverse workforce and ensuring that all candidates regardless of their background haveequitableaccess to our application process. We proactively encourage applicants who identify as havinga disability neurodiversity or long-term health conditions to let us know if theyrequireany reasonable adjustments as part of their application process.

If you dorequireany reasonable adjustments please email us at

Required Experience:

Director