Senior Full Stack Software Engineer & Digital Architect

29 April 2026

Purpose of the post

HDR UK requires the services of an experienced Senior Full Stack Software Engineer & Digital Architect to develop the next phase of our technical solutions including the Health Data Research Gateway (www.healthdatagateway.org), Safe People Registry (https://safepeopleregistry.org/), Cohort Discovery Service (https://healthdatagateway.org/en/about/cohort-discovery) and future technology services. This includes how our services, standards and associated open APIs work with the wider Technology Ecosystem across a range of academic, clinical, and industry groups.

The successful candidate will be part of a multidisciplinary team that develops an over-arching interoperable infrastructure to ensure that UK health data assets are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reuseable (FAIR) and accessible for research, innovation and clinical trials. The chosen applicant will be expected to work within an Agile software development team, providing development of infrastructure and services to deliver scientific insights, that improve health and healthcare of the UK and worldwide populations.

The successful candidate will be expected to provide individual contribution as a full stack hands-on engineer, work across the team’s technical products and with wider Technology Ecosystem development teams, carry out code review & quality checks and document as required, as well as document product designs and logical flows. The chosen applicant will play a key role in providing technical input to internal and external meetings and workshops. They will utilise their technical knowledge to translate technical requirements from Product Owners and key external groups to develop high level digital architecture designs.

Main Responsibilities

Software Development:

• Hands-on Full Stack software development
• Developing all different aspects of the Technology Teams Products including Search, Content Management, APIs, Visualisations and Integrations
• Working to an agile methodology
• Documenting code, conducting code reviews with the team and maintaining high quality, performant and testable code

Technical architecture and design, including:

• Meeting with a range of stakeholder groups, collecting and translating requirements into high level architecture designs, including but not limited to:- Application modelling and logical flows
  – Database Schema design, with best practice and optimisation in mind
  – Mapping information flow between interoperable systems

• Documentation of architectures and designs as well as on-going ownership of documentation
• PSR standards and optimisations surrounding code
• Continually monitor and expose candidates for refactoring within our local and wider code projects
• Monitor and administer application updates as and when release candidates are prepared

Technical Leadership:

• Troubleshooting and supporting development issues as they arise working with the team and escalating to Technical Programme Director as necessary
• Demonstrable ability to collaborate and guide external partners on how to utilise, and integrate with, our new developments.
• Maintain and share awareness of current best practices in software development, open science, reproducibility and agile methodology
• Demonstrate technical leadership by voicing concerns about proposed solutions and offer alternatives where appropriate
• Lead technically on developments of proofs of concept to completion, including design and documentation of new systems

Essential knowledge, skills, and experience

• Experience working in an agile / scrum software development team
• Comfortable operating across national teams and different strategic initiatives (i.e. science and technology)
• Experience using Confluence, JIRA, Trello or similar Agile project management tools
• 7+ years software development experience
• Exceptional attention to detail
• Demonstrable experience using Git (preferably GitHub)
• Have worked with software development best practice (e.g. testing, continuous integration, documentation, release management)
• Have been through all software development life cycle stages (requirements, prioritisation, specification, design, code and test).
• Delivered code in an iterative project management-based context.
• Worked as part of a team of engineers (four or more concurrently) working on a codebase.
• Project Management skills
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Excellent time management and organisational skills
• Excellent writing and technical documentation skills
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team
• Ability to liaise confidently and effectively with a range of individuals
• Willingness to learn and develop
• A good BSc. (2:1 or better) in Computer Science or other related subject with a strong computational component or equivalent experience
• Experience presenting at technical and non-technical workshops
• Ability to research, adapt to and adopt new technologies and approaches
• Experience in ongoing mentoring and professional development of other technical staff
• While our technology team is language agnostic, a core understanding of ReactJS (Next.js) and PHP (Laravel) is required, as it makes up the majority of our tech stack
• Proficient in English

To view the full job description please download the attachment below.

Please note, as we are a UK-based organisation,  applicants must be living in, and eligible to work in, the UK. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time. 

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.

We politely request no contact from recruitment agencies or media sales. We do not accept speculative CVs from recruitment agencies nor accept the fees associated with them.