(Or Senior) Data Platform Architect - Generative Biology Institute

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, policy makers, and entrepreneurs 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 Generative Biology Institute:

The Generative Biology Institute (GBI) at the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) aims to overcome two major challenges in making biology engineerable: 1) the ability to precisely synthesize entire genomes, and 2) understanding which DNA sequences will create biological systems that perform desired functions. Solving these challenges will unlock the potential of biology for transformative solutions in health, sustainability, agriculture, and more. GBI will house 60 groups and over 600 researchers, supported by cutting-edge facilities and sustained funding to address global challenges and advance biology engineering.

Your Role:

At EIT we are seeking an experienced and detailed orientated Data Platform Architect to play a pivotal part in designing and implementing cutting-edge data platforms to support the GBI mission. You'll collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to understand research requirements and translate them into robust data models and architectures.

As a Data Platform Architect, you'll have the opportunity to shape the future of our data platform and collaborate with research and product teams to deliver analytical and AI products to transform accelerate bioscience discovery and translational research. You'll be responsible for defining and implementing 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 organization.

This is a role for computing systems engineers and researcher who think long-term and want to help build a research infrastructure that will underpin the next generation of scientific and technological discovery.

It is unlikely that one person can meet all of our criteria, so if you can meet the essential ones and can demonstrate how you will be placed to deliver the responsibilities outlined below, we would strongly you to apply.

Key Responsibilities (at all levels):

• Formulating the data model and standards to be used by GBI’s data platform to support interoperability, automation, and bioscience research.
• Collaborate with various stakeholder groups to ensure GBI’s data platform works seamless with similar systems across EIT and external collaborator. Responsible for producing architecture artifacts and presenting the work through architecture governance.
• Developing data platform including different data flows, data lifecycle, data security, durability, provenance, as well as applying consistent documentation standards and architecture methods.
• Supporting developers and researchers, making sure they can fully utilize the data platform by a combination of mentoring and direct involvement.
• (senior level hires only) Manage GBI’s data platform on HPC environments, including Linux-based clusters, schedulers (e.g., Slurm), and high-performance storage systems (e.g., Lustre, BeeGFS, GPFS).
• (senior level hires only) Support reproducible research through data provenance, containerization (Singularity, Docker, etc.), workflow orchestration (Nextflow, Kubernetes, OpenHPC, etc.), and MLOps.

Essential Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Knowledge of master, metadata and reference data management
• Knowledge of architecting and delivering modern data platform standards, tools and patterns including data lakes, lake houses, iceberg, data mesh
• Ability to work collaboratively with multidisciplinary research teams and translate computational needs into technical solutions.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Experience architecting, building, and delivering modern data platforms at scale
• (senior level hires only) 3+ years of relevant experience managing HPC systems in research, biological and biomedical, or academic environment
• (senior level hires only) Extensive experience designing, deploying, and managing storage systems for HPC clusters (or cloud computing) in scientific or research settings.

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

Our Benefits:

• Competitive salary + travel allowance + bonus
• Enhanced holiday pay
• Pension
• Life Assurance
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance
• Hospital Cash Plan
• Therapy Services
• Perk Box
• Electric 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).