We bring the widest benefit to society through enabling the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere
At Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), we develop ground-breaking portable genetic sequencers for medical research in universities, hospitals and organisations across the world. Ours is the only sequencing platform to provide ultra-long reads of DNA or RNA samples of any size in truly portable devices.
Our headquarters are in the beautiful Oxford Science Park, with secondary offices across the UK, the USA, APAC and Europe.
ONT employs over 1400 people from diverse areas of expertise, including, molecular biology, informatics, data and software engineering, electronics, manufacturing and commercialisation. The senior leadership team, led by CEO Dr Gordon Sanghera, has a strong track record of successfully delivering ground-breaking medical technologies.
About this role
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.
Key responsibilities
1. 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 and AWS/Kubernetes infrastructure Provide second-line support for our systems, working directly with our internal user base Design careful and targeted solutions to important business problems
2. 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
3. Help the team define, estimate, prioritise and track work: Create and manage clear and informative Jira tickets to track agreed work Engage in planning, estimation and prioritisation meetings
4. Suggest and drive efficiency improvements to our systems and pipelines: Write tests; improve GitLab pipelines & K8s manifests; optimise repository settings, introduce metrics and dashboards
5. Uphold and enhance our team values, standards and practices: Continually improving our team documentation, working practices and code standards Engage in team retrospectives to continuously improve the team Participate in code reviews to collaboratively enhance code quality
Technologies we use
We make use of the following technologies and services.
Experience in these is helpful, but these are not all required for the role. We care more about your ability to perform the key responsibilities mentioned above than your expertise in a specific technology.
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 Kubernetes Service (EKS); Elastic Container Registry (ECR);
Simple Storage Service (S3); Elastic File System (EFS);
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networking and security groups Benefits
On top of an excellent starting salary, we offer a significant annual bonus, generous pension contributions and sick leave allowance, private healthcare and a generous share plan.
Our office building is situated within beautiful, landscaped surroundings with tree-lined walks, water features and a lake, all of which make for a wonderful working environment.
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 a number of systems to fulfil our mission; most importantly:
6. Sawtooth suite: Three Django/Flask/React applications for manufacturing operators to track their manufacturing sessions
7. Orca: A highly-available Flask API for receiving telemetry data from all our genetic sequencing devices across the world
8. Equipment Management Registry: A Django application for tracking the maintenance of equipment
9. End to End Data Transfer: A batch processing system for receiving and importing data from third party suppliers
How we work
We group our work into fortnightly sprints, roughly following a model, with a daily standup and fortnightly planning meeting, refinement meetings, stakeholder meetings and retrospectives.
We mostly work from home, but we meet in the office to plan the upcoming sprint on the Monday at the start of each sprint.
Principles
To enhance our work, we believe in: Open and clear communication; A practice of writing things down; Taking clear ownership; Efficiency through automation; Under-promise, over-deliver; No-blame culture.
Apply today to use your skills to really make a difference to humankind!