Senior Research Associate – Software Engineer

Job description

Working as part of a multidisciplinary team, the successful candidate will play a key role in applied informatics research to design develop and manage software projects which will use the CogStack platform https://cogstack.org/ for interrogating health records with patient reported outcomes data collected from the IMPARTS programme https://imparts.org/about/.  The postholder will utilise existing data platforms and create approved linkages to analyse and evaluate health outcomes. This project sits within the portfolio of clinical and health informatics platforms at King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley (SLaM) Biomedical Research Centre. The successful candidate will form a link between a clinical team based in the Department of Psychological Medicine and the Department of Biostatistics and Clinical Informatics.  

This post will be offered on an secondment or a fixed-term contract for 12 months 

This is a full-time  post  

Key responsibilities

● Develop, test, deploy and maintain a new scalable platform for information extraction and retrieval from NHS electronic health record systems.   

● Integrate modern search engine technologies (e.g. ElasticSearch) with structured data and annotations derived with NLP methods.  

● Assist with the development of research and clinical business intelligence tools build on top of the information retrieval/extraction platform. 

● Assist with developing methods for harmonization and curation of health data from diverse data sources using established open source solutions and standards. 

● Develop tools for transforming raw data into research-ready data and implement data cleaning, harmonization, de-identification and standardization operations. 

● Develop analysis and visualisation tools for characterizing heterogeneous data sources and presenting the summaries to non-technical audiences such as clinicians. 

● Build algorithms for phenotyping electronic health records and work with clinicians on implementing decision support and business intelligence tools. 

● Assist on the creation, evaluation and validation of novel linkages and phenotyping algorithms. 

● Participate in agile practices to improve the quality and efficiency of software development within the team. 

The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post.  

Skills, knowledge, and experience

Essential criteria  

1. Relevant BSc (computer science, mathematical, bioinformatics or similar) 

2. Relevant Masters and/or PhD degree (biological science, statistics computer science, bioinformatics or equivalent) 

3. Demonstrable significant relevant experience or relevant PhD 

4. Up to date with new approaches in software development such as microservice architectures 

5. Knowledge of containerization with Docker 

6. Design and development of RESTful web services (OpenAPI, Swagger, etc.) 

7. Significant Java programming experience 

8. Experience developing Data Integration, Stream and Batch data processing applications 

9. Experience developing data processing pipelines (e.g. using Apache NiFI, Apache Airflow, Luigi) 

10. Experience of various aspects of data management and SQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL) 

Desirable criteria 

11. Experience with the Spring Enterprise framework 

12. Excellent knowledge of Python 

13. Knowledge of HL7 standards, especially FHIR 

Further information

This post is subject to Disclosure and Barring Service and Occupational Health clearance. 

Post-Doctoral, clinical informatics