Senior Staff Data Engineer

Summary

The Senior Staff Data Engineer will define architecture, set technical standards, and mentor a growing team within a data engineering function. The role requires deep expertise in large-scale data engineering, including distributed processing and cloud data platforms.

Salary: £70,000 - 110,000 per year

Requirements:
  • PhD or MSc and equivalent experience in a STEM subject.
  • Extensive experience operating at the senior staff level within a data engineering function, including defining architecture, standards and technical direction, mentoring data engineers, and establishing strong engineering principles within a growing team.
  • Deep expertise in large-scale data engineering, including distributed processing frameworks, pipeline orchestration, cloud data platforms and data integration at scale, with experience integrating internal and third-party datasets and working effectively with external data providers and technology partners.
  • Strong understanding of biomedical and healthcare data domains, such as genomics, transcriptomics, multi-omics, imaging, clinical data, electronic health records or real-world data, alongside an understanding of machine learning data requirements, including versioning, reproducibility and tensor-based workflows for large-scale AI systems.
  • Experience implementing data governance in practice, including metadata management, lineage, provenance, ontologies, cataloguing and FAIR principles, and familiarity with Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and controlled-access research data environments.
  • Strong collaboration and influencing skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders, with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly.
Responsibilities:
  • Set the technical direction, strategy and roadmap for data engineering, aligned to AI Accelerator priorities.
  • Own the data engineering architecture for the AI Accelerator, defining and evolving a layered medallion-style architecture, feature and embedding provisioning patterns, and the harmonised multimodal data foundation that underpins model development.
  • Establish data engineering standards and engineering practices, including data quality controls, testing, CI/CD for data, reproducibility standards, data contracts, metadata management and dataset versioning.
  • Deliver hands-on leadership on the most difficult and highest-impact data engineering challenges, including integrating novel and complex modalities such as genomics, transcriptomics, imaging, clinical and real-world datasets.
  • Partner with the Data Excellence community and IT to align on governance, ontologies, metadata harmonisation, stewardship and shared enterprise data foundations.
  • Establish ways of working and coach other team members, onboarding, mentoring and technically leading data engineers as the team scales, while acting as the senior escalation point for complex data engineering challenges.
Technologies:
  • AI
  • CI/CD
  • Cloud
  • Machine Learning
  • Support
  • MLOps
  • Model Training

More:

We are the AI Accelerator within Computational Innovation in London, a global organisation spanning computational biology, human genetics, data excellence and AI. Our mission is to build production-quality AI capabilities that deepen our understanding of disease biology and increase the probability of success by integrating diverse biomedical data sources and embedding causal thinking into what we build. This role is a unique opportunity to join a critical strategic initiative within Boehringer Ingelheim, a company recognised as a Top Employer in the UK. The role is hybrid, with approximately four days a week in the office, and offers the chance to directly influence how we understand disease, identify therapeutic opportunities and accelerate the development of innovative medicines for patients.

last updated 35 week of 2026

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