Lead Cloud Engineer: Sponsorship Available

Job Summary

Barts Health is one of the largest NHS trusts in the country, and one of Britain’s leading healthcare providers. We are now recruiting a Lead Cloud Engineer into a new role to help maintain, operate and scale the cloud infrastructure that will support the Barts Health Data Platform which will be used by the DSIT funded PharosAI project.

This is a role that will expose you to world-leading research relating to patient and health care data – implementing the NHS goal of using data to save lives. The Lead Cloud Engineer, will be part of the Precision Medicine team within Barts Health Informatics, helping to support researchers and clinicians to develop and implement exciting data analysis projects to personalise the treatment of patients

The successful candidate will have:

• Extensive experience of working with cloud services ideally within the NHS, academia or in the private sector.
• Substantial experience in undertaking technical tasks around cloud engineering for data and compute infrastructure, and software deployment on a public cloud provider.
• Experience in leading the delivery of public cloud solutions (ideally Azure) as part of a team.
• Experience in using an agile methodology to deliver infrastructure integration projects within a distributed team.
• Demonstrable scripting or programming skills (e.g., Python, BASH, Terraform, GitHub, etc.).

Main duties of the job

We are using modern cloud technology to build the Barts Health Data Platform and its ‘Secure Data Environment’ (SDE) containing Barts Health patient data that complies with all necessary security and governance requirements. The SDE will need to be adaptable and usable for a range of different users supporting a range of analysis activities. We will look to source components of our SDE from other open-source work taking place in the community (such as the Azure TRE project) and make the resulting work publicly available.

The main duties of the Lead Cloud Engineer are to identify, investigate, implement and manage the cloud computing services and data management systems that comprise the SDE, with particular reference to the services and developments needed to support our participation in PharosAI, which will involve close collaboration with that project on a daily basis. In addition, the Lead Cloud Engineer will plan, design and organize customizations of the SDE for researchers and clinicians to support approved projects by working with teams of contractors. You will be continually evaluating the suitability and integrating open-source software and services into the SDE as required while ensuring the security of patient data.

Person Specification

Experience

Essential

• Substantial experience in leading the analysis of different complex technical/architectural solutions (e.g., cost, time, complexity, suitability, usability, etc.), around unique cloud deployments and selecting an option that is aligned with the agreed policy and strategy.
• Experience in communicating complex technical solutions relating to securing sensitive patient data to users undertaking difficult data analysis tasks.
• Experience in adapting or formulating new technical strategies and policies for a service and using their persuasion/negotiation skills to change these through the relevant governance structures and communicating these changes to users.
• Experience in taking technical leadership around delivering a data and compute infrastructure on a public cloud provider using their cloud and software engineering knowledge that meets agreed requirements.
• Experience in managing development projects of new custom services of at least £1M through internal staff or external contractors and approving related payments for work delivered as a responsible budget holder.
• Experience of monitoring, managing and optimising the costs incurred by different workloads in public clouds within a defined budget of at least £150K/year.
• Experience in leading discussions with end-users to understand and to deliver on their requirements even when the proposed solution may require negotiation and persuasion for the user to accept the outcome.
• Experience in establishing networking environments and monitoring cloud security in networks which contain sensitive patient data that must remain secured.
• Experience of managing direct reports, staff working under contract, and working collaboratively with distributed technical teams in a matrix management model.
• Experience of leading technical work within a team by breaking down a larger technical problem into smaller tasks and managing the delivery of these individual tasks from the team.
• Experience in developing and delivering technical training around the use of a data analysis environment to researchers and clinicians.
• Experience in leading architectural cloud design processes leading to the operation and delivery of large-scale complex cloud solutions (including public, private and hybrid platforms) through a team.
• Experience in interpreting complex policies, potentially from multiple sources, into clear operational processes for IT services, with a demonstratable record of communicating these within a team.
• Experience in using an agile methodology to deliver projects within an organization that uses a structured design methodology.
• Demonstrable scripting or programming skills (e.g., Python, BASH, Terraform, GitHub, etc.)
• Ability to use continuous integration and distribution pipelines (DevOps) to deploy applications using Infrastructure as Code model and the use of containers in support such a process.
• Ability to code, deploy and debug complex software and infrastructure environments and to upgrade systems rapidly to implement essential security measures.
• Demonstrated ability to assimilate new ideas and work with problem owners to turn ideas into practical, applied techniques, and willingness to continue to learn new techniques.
• Experience in assembling long-term strategic technology plans for an IT service to meet the complex user requirements coming from multiple stakeholders in the organisation.
• Demonstrable experience of leading one’s own work, including planning and execution.

Desirable

• Experience of working within a research organisation.
• Experience with utilizing high performance computing or other specialized compute resources for analysis.
• Experience with cloud-based analysis environments for research or data analysis workloads.
• Experience in handling healthcare datasets, (e.g., electronic patient records, Genomics, PACS images, etc.)
• Experience of working in technology-reliant organization through the process of change, maturity and innovation uplift.
• Translating the requirements of NHS and ISO security practices into IT practices.
• Experience in API design and usage, command line interface and SDKs for writing applications.
• Experience in open-source projects and development models.
• Experience with the Azure TRE or equivalent systems (i.e., TREs or SDEs).
• Experience of working with external contractors, service providers or consultants.

Skills

Essential

• High level interpersonal and organization skills – a self-starter.
• Ability to analyze and interpret complex information and produce regular reports on the current status, trend analysis and service improvement of an IT Service.
• Ability to lead in the development of technical design proposals.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including preparing/reviewing technical documentation, report writing and presentations.
• Able to present complex or technical information clearly to technical peers at large workshops, to communicate technical issues to the public, and to lead interactive training sessions in person or remotely for non-experts.
• Be an effective team player while being able to engage and lead technical teams.
• Able to support the researchers and clinicians making use of the SDE service by finding and introducing new capability that helps them undertake their research activities.
• Ability to work with users to understand their complex IT needs in order to resolve their analysis challenges and balance these needs with others to deliver a service for all.
• Ability to rapidly develop strong working relationships and gain the confidence of others.
• Self-motivated, hardworking and able to organise tasks within a team.
• Willingness to work flexibly in order to achieve project demands.
• Able to use the tools and applications that reside in Windows and UNIX/Linux computing environments through the use of desktop/laptop devices for most of the working day.

Desirable

• Official certification (or at least thorough knowledge) of Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essential+, Data Security and Protection Toolkit, ISO/IEC17799:2005 and ISO/IEC 27001:2005