Data Architect - 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 Data Architect. You'll have the opportunity to shape the future of our data platform and collaborate with platform and product teams to deliver analytical and AI products to transform pathogen monitoring and diagnostics. You'll be responsible for defining data standards, data models and best practices to ensure the integrity, security, and accessibility of our data assets. Additionally, you'll play a key role in optimising data processes and workflows, driving efficiencies, and fostering a data-driven culture within the organisation.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities:

• Understand and manage the data requirements by working with stakeholders to analyse requirements and identifying those of architectural significance
• Formulating the data model and standards to be used by the data platform to support interoperability and federation to support pathogen monitoring and research
• Communicating the data architecture to various stakeholder groups within EIT
• Developing data architectures including different data flows, data lifecycle, data security, durability, as well as applying consistent documentation standards and architecture methods
• Supporting developers and making sure they can realise the data architecture by a combination of mentoring and direct involvement 
• Responsible for producing architecture artifacts and presenting the work through architecture governance
• Verifying implementations and ensuring the delivered systems is consistent with the agreed architecture and meets requirements 
• Defining architecture data standards are defined to ensure compliance. This may include Medical Device Accreditation (where relevant)
• Ensuring that squads have available a set of standard patterns, guidance, and technical standards to help them deliver
• Ensuring solutions are documented and assured through defined architecture governance processes

Essential Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Knowledge and experience of architecting and delivering modern data platform standards, tools and patterns including data lakes, lake houses, iceberg, data mesh
• Experience of architecting, building, and delivering modern data platforms at scale
• Familiar with TOGAF and other enterprise architecture frameworks
• Experience and knowledge of data governance, data quality, and data cataloguing
• Knowledge of master, metadata and reference data management
• An understanding of Agile working practices and sprint based methodology
• Capable of actively contributing to knowledge sharing 

Desirable Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Knowledge of genomics
• Experience with cloud-based data platforms preferably Oracle OCI or equivalent AWS and Azure services
• Understanding of federation standards for genomics ( ga4gh)
• Understanding of data standards for pathogen data interoperability PHA4GE
• Experience of architecting data standards for research environments
• Experience with healthcare clinical data and associated standards OMOP , snowmed

Key Attributes:

• Collaboration
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment
• Willingness to learn and cross train / upskill in new technology
• Willingness to be hands on to explore new technology or develop POC’s

Benefits

We offer the following salary and benefits:

• Competitive Salary + Travel Allowance + Bonus
• 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).
• Hybrid working