Engineering Technical Lead, Cancer Research
£72-77k
More information about location
1-2 days a week in office (Stratford, London)
Cancer prevention, awareness and research charity
Job no longer available
Cancer prevention, awareness and research charity
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
£72-77k
More information about location
1-2 days a week in office (Stratford, London)
1001+ employees
Company mission
To prevent, control and cure cancer through ground-breaking research.
Role
Who you are
- Experienced Engineering Lead with experience leading the delivery of technology solutions from design to go-live across disciplines, with an understanding of:
- Cloud-native architecture and AWS services (e.g., Compute, Storage, development kits)
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Python, R, automation and CI/CD
- ETL pipelines
- Various SQL and noSQL databases, as well as messaging queues (such as SQS)
- Linux/Unix environments (e.g., to manage files, navigate the command line, run system commands, and perform routine troubleshooting)
- The software development lifecycle, methods (e.g., SCRUM, Kanban), and approaches (e.g., DevOps, and test and behaviour-driven development)
- Acted as a technical lead in a team, starting the development of new features or products from scratch, defining the overall solution, and reviewing more junior engineers’ work
- Ability to write clean, readable, and properly tested code based on tried and tested design patterns, with a willingness to learn new languages, frameworks and tools
- Experience running critical services in production and designing highly available, scalable and secure solutions
- Has successfully built credible and collaborative internal and external stakeholder relationships with strong interpersonal, communication, influencing, and negotiating skills (including senior leadership)
- A proactive, solutions-focused approach to problem-solving, encouraging innovation, promoting best practices, and challenging conventional organisational approaches and thinking
- A resilient and adaptable leader with experience driving change and motivating teams and stakeholders in navigating ambiguity and responding to evolving business needs
- Experience working in scientific or research environments, with an understanding of scientific workflows, data requirements, and High‑Performance Computing (HPC) principles, would be advantageous but is not essential
What the job involves
- Reports to: Head of Engineering
- As a Technical Lead, you’ll provide technical leadership across a cross‑disciplinary engineering department, shaping and delivering complex initiatives that support pioneering research
- You’ll act as a technical translator and strategic enabler, bridging engineering, product teams, and scientific innovation to deliver solutions ranging from our About Cancer website through to AWS‑hosted data platforms and ETL pipelines that enable bioinformaticians and scientists to carry out drug discovery trials
- You’ll take ownership of the end‑to‑end quality and delivery of technical solutions, from early design through to go‑live
- This includes overseeing technical implementation, managing low‑level design activities, and coordinating the engineering capabilities and resources required to turn ambitious ideas into robust, scalable solutions
- Your legacy by the end of this contract will be to have made a tangible impact by delivering engineering solutions that directly improve how our researchers and clinicians work, accelerating progress towards beating cancer
- If you’re an experienced Technical Lead with a proven track record delivering complex solutions across a hybrid estate using AWS, Python, and ETL pipelines, we would love for you to join our mission
- Being the technical lead for key initiatives across Cancer Research UK’s Scientific Research & Innovation (R&I) product portfolio by:
- Acting as a technical authority and knowledge source for the wider team
- Providing mentorship to help others grow their technical capabilities
- Please note: This role does not include formal people‑management responsibilities and is focused on providing technical leadership, expertise, and strategic direction
- Collaborating with Product and Project Managers, Architects, and product teams across disciplines to identify technical requirements
- Holding technology partners to account with appropriate scrutiny through technical assurance
- Transitioning high-level designs to delivery by collaborating closely with solution architects and supporting key transition activities
- Documenting low-level designs in accordance with technical delivery standards
- Contributing to test strategies and plans as determined by the project or initiative
- Serving as the primary technical contact for scientific teams and stakeholders, translating research workflows and data requirements into scalable technical solutions
- Designing and implementing complex cloud solutions for scientific workloads, staying current with research-focused services
- Contributing to, and co-designing, solutions to support our Therapeutic Innovation team’s growing and changing data needs (e.g. data warehouse/data lake and ETL pipelines)
- Applying SRE and DevOps best practices, implementing automation and CI/CD pipelines to reduce toil and improve reliability
- Challenging thinking through open discourse and clear outcomes
- Collaborating with colleagues across Technology to identify and utilise key skills for tactical output
Application process
- Closing date: 27 April 2026
Salary benchmarks
Our take
The world’s largest independent cancer research charity, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) was founded from a merger between the Cancer Research Campaign and the Cancer Research Fund in 2002. CRC and ICRF had been long-standing pinnacles of the British medical institution, their work dating back to 1902 and 1923 respectively, and the merger signalled a strong step forward for UK medical institutes’ global influence.
A multi-armed charity, CRUK uses both grant-funded researchers and its own employed staff to research the treatments and causes of cancer, whilst its striking advertising and marketing campaigns are responsible for influencing public policy on the causes, prevention, and treatment of the disease. An example of a significant public campaign was Stoptober, which appeared to have triggered a third of a million smokers at the time to try quit tobacco throughout the month of October.
Alongside its pharmaceutical efforts, in 2023 CRUK funded clinical trials for the first-ever proton beam therapy for breast cancer, indicating a focus on technological innovations in the fight against cancer. On this subject, CRUK has also taken part in a billion-pound investment in the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research institute that is aiming to make England an international leader in the industry.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Stratford, London, UK
Leadership
Michelle is a Trustee at the Francis Crick Institute and an Advisory Council Member at The King's FUnd. Previously, she served as a Non-Executive Director at NHS England and as CEO at the MS Society.
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