Software Engineer

Oxford, England, United Kingdom

12/4/2024

Job Description

Oxford Nanopore Technologies is headquartered at the Oxford Science Park outside Oxford, UK, with satellite offices and a commercial presence in many global locations across the US, APAC and Europe.

Oxford Nanopore employs from multiple subject areas including nanopore science, molecular biology and applications, informatics, engineering, electronics, manufacturing and commercialisation. The management team, led by CEO Dr Gordon Sanghera, has a track record of delivering disruptive technologies to the market.

Oxford Nanopore’s sequencing platform is the only technology that offers real-time analysis, in fully scalable formats from pocket to population scale, that can analyse native DNA or RNA and sequence any length of fragment to achieve short to ultra-long read lengths. Our goal is to enable the analysis of any living thing, by anyone, anywhere!

Along with 3 other software engineers in the Manufacturing Tracking (MT) team, you will optimise ONT’s systems for driving manufacturing processes and for collecting device telemetry data for analysis. Please note that this role is mostly working from home, but we meet in the office to plan the upcoming sprint on the Monday at the start of each sprint.

This role is a hybrid role with a requirement to come into our Oxford HQ one day per week (Monday's) regularly.

The Details…

About The Manufacturing Tracking Team

Our mission is to optimise manufacturing efficiency and reliable capture of device telemetry across ONT.

Our team has four experienced software engineers (including this position), and sits within the Operational Systems Engineering department in Global IT. We also collaborate with data engineers and software engineers from across the business.

We build several systems to fulfil our mission, most importantly:

• Sawtooth suite: Three Django/Flask/React applications for manufacturing operators to track their manufacturing sessions
• Orca: A highly-available Flask API for receiving telemetry data from all our genetic sequencing devices across the world
• Equipment Management Registry: A Django application for tracking the maintenance of equipment
• End to End Data Transfer: A batch processing system for receiving and importing data from third party suppliers
  
  
  

What We’re Looking For…

At a minimum, this role requires significant experience of server-side programming and fluency with collaborating on code in a Git-based hosting platform.

Responsibilities

Beyond that, we are generally looking for candidates who are well suited to carry out the following key responsibilities of this role:

• Efficiently develop & deliver improvements to our systems to support business needs:
• Develop our Python- and React-based webapps and API services through GitLab merge requests
• Maintain and improve the MySQL database data, schemas and structures
• Evolve the GitLab deployment pipelines, Kubernetes manifests and AWS resources
• Provide second-line support for our systems, working directly with our internal user base
• Design careful and targeted solutions to important business problems
• Suggest and drive efficiency improvements by writing tests, optimising repository settings and introducing metrics & dashboards
• Improve our team’s spirit, sense of purpose and efficiency:
• Uphold and enhance our team values, standards and practices
• Define, estimate, prioritise and track work in prioritisation meetings and beyond
• Create and manage clear, informative Jira tickets to track agreed work
• Improve our team documentation, working practices and code standards
• Engage in team retrospectives to drive further improvements
• Collaboratively enhance code quality through code reviews
• Engage with diverse stakeholders from across the organisation to define targeted improvements to meet ONT’s strategic goals:
• Drive requirements-gathering meetings and important discussions in Slack and Jira
• Lead initiatives from kick-off to delivery
  
  
  

Technologies we use

We Make Use Of The Following Technologies And Services

Managing work: Jira; Confluence; Slack

Languages: Python; JavaScript; Typescript

Frameworks: Django; Flask; React

Databases: MySQL; MongoDB Atlas

Pipeline tools: Gitlab repositories, merge requests & CI pipelines; Kubernetes manifests, Kustomize & kubectl

AWS infrastructure: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances; Lambdas; Elastic Kuberneres Service (EKS); Elastic Container Registry (ECR); Simple Storage Services (S3); Elastic File System (EFS); Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networking and security groups

While experience in these technologies is helpful, they are not all required for the role. We care more about your ability to perform the role’s responsibilities than your expertise in specific technologies.

Our team engages with problems to understand the context and then design appropriate, effective solutions in an environment where priorities and requirements can change significantly over time. This sees us working with a wide range of stakeholders from various disciplines and at varying levels of seniority.

We prioritise openness and clear communication, and all contribute to the evolution of the team through honest feedback and regular retrospectives. We are looking for someone who shares these values, is enthusiastic about sharing their insight to help meet our challenges, and will be engaged in our working environment.

What We Offer…..

We offer outstanding benefits to include an attractive bonus, generous pension contributions, private healthcare and an excellent starting salary. Based within beautiful, landscaped surroundings with tree-lined walks, water features and a lake, all of which make for a wonderful working environment.

If you are looking to utilise your skills to really make a difference to humankind, then consider joining our team and apply today!

Please note that no terminology in this advert is intended to discriminate on the grounds of a person's gender, marital status, race, religion, colour, age, disability or sexual orientation. Every candidate will be assessed only in accordance with their merits, qualifications and abilities to perform the duties of the job.

About Us

Oxford Nanopore’s goal is to bring the widest benefits to society through enabling the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere. The company has developed a new generation of nanopore-based sensing technology enabling the real-time, high-performance, accessible and scalable analysis of DNA and RNA. The technology is used in more than 100 countries to understand the biology of humans and diseases, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses and whole environments.

Oxford Nanopore was founded in 2005 as a spin-out from the University of Oxford and now employs over 1000 employees around the world.