Principal Engineer (Architect) - TRE/Data Architecture

Our Future Health is an ambitious collaboration between the public, charity and private sectors, designed to help people live healthier lives for longer through better prevention, earlier detection and 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 help identify and treat diseases early, when outcomes are usually better. With over 2.5M volunteers across the UK, we’re now the world’s 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 mission. Our systems power websites, clinics across the UK, secure analytics and research systems, pipelines that process highly sensitive health and genetic data, and we are continuing to grow our engineering capability to support this ambition.  

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Technology team to help lead the technical design, procurement, build and integration of the next iteration of the Our Future Health “trusted research environment” (TRE). Our current TRE has been successful but we are now thinking about our future challenges around scale (the unique volumes of data Our Future Health expects to collect over the next 5-10 years (including potentially whole genome sequencing data on millions of our volunteers)) and usability (including future AI tools). The TRE is also key to unlocking the commercial revenue growth Our Future Health will be seeking over the next few years to ultimately become self-sustaining for the decades to come. 

This year we will be doing a procurement to find a partner (or partners) to work with us to solve these challenges. The role will have an incredibly high impact - to enable research at this scale has never been done before, we will be creating a beyond-cutting edge system, but it is a necessary step in order for Our Future Health to have the national and global impact we are aiming for. 

Our Future Health exists as part of a wider health data and research community in the UK and across the world, the TRE is a key part of this. This role will involve representing Our Future Health in and collaborating with this wider community, working with our founding industry members, our users, other research organisations and biobanks.

You will also be joining the wider Technology team at Our Future Heath at a very senior level and expected to take on typical engineering and architecture leadership activities. 

Responsibilities inc - 

• 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.