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Job summary

Main area
Administration
Grade
NHS AfC: Band 8b
Contract
24 months (Fixed Term with possibility of extension)
Hours
Full time - 37.5 hours per week
Job ref
196-COF11106-S
Employer
Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust
Employer type
NHS
Site
London Institute for Healthcare Engineering
Town
London
Salary
£72,921 - £83,362 per annum inc HCA
Salary period
Yearly
Closing
09/04/2026 23:59

Employer heading

Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust logo

Lead Data Engineer

NHS AfC: Band 8b

Guy’s and St Thomas’ is among the UK’s busiest and most successful NHS foundation trusts. We provide a full range of hospital and community services for people in south London and as well as specialist care for patients from further afield including cancer, renal, orthopaedic, respiratory and cardiovascular services.

Guy’s is home to the largest dental school in Europe and a £160 million Cancer Centre opened in 2016. As part of our commitment to provide care closer to home, in 2017 we also opened a cancer centre and a kidney treatment centre at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup. St Thomas’ has one of the largest critical care units in the UK and one of the busiest emergency departments in London. It is also home to Evelina London Children’s Hospital.

Evelina London cares for local children in Lambeth and Southwark and provides specialist services across south east England including cardiac, renal and critical care services. We lead a number of specialist service networks aiming to ensure children are treated locally where possible, but have access to specialist expertise when they need it. Our community services include health visiting, school nursing and support for families of children with long-term conditions. 

Our adult community services teams deliver care at the heart of the local communities we serve, working in partnership with GPs, local authorities and other healthcare and voluntary sector organisations. Working with our partners in Lambeth and Southwark, we are focusing on new ways of working to improve care for local patients.

In February 2021 the Royal Brompton and Harefield joined Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, bringing together world-leading expertise in the care and research of heart and lung disease. Our merger provides a once in a generation opportunity to build a lasting, world-renowned heart and lung centre, providing the highest quality care for patients and conducting world-leading research.

We have a reputation for clinical excellence and high quality teaching and research. We are part of King’s Health Partners, one of eight accredited UK academic health sciences centres. In partnership with King’s College London we have dedicated clinical research facilities including an MHRA accredited Phase I clinical trials unit.

Patients are at the heart of everything we do and we pride ourselves on ensuring the best possible patient experience as well as safe, high quality care. We are proud to have one of the lowest mortality rates in the NHS. Following a comprehensive Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection in 2019 we maintained our overall rating of ‘good’. Our adult community services achieved a rating of ‘outstanding’.

The commitment of our 23,500 staff is key to our success. We are one of the largest local employers and we aim to develop and support all our staff so they are able to deliver high quality, safe and efficient care. The 2019 NHS staff survey results show that we have one of the most engaged and motivated workforces in the NHS. We know this has a positive impact on the care provided to our patients.

We have one of the most ambitious capital investment programmes anywhere in the NHS.



Job overview

This is an exciting opportunity to join a leading health data engineering team, based at GSTT, but operating across Health Data for London and the AI Centre.

We are looking for a motivated individual with excellent data engineering and infrastructure skills, who can be independently forward deployed across NHS hospitals in London to lead development of infrastructure and data pipelines, working in SQL/dbt and using language AI for curating unstructured data. You will work on a pan-London Snowflake platform, solving key technical challenges to enable data-driven value for a population of >10 million.

Essential Criteria

  • Relevant technical degree
  • Proficient in SQL, dbt, Python, and orchestration frameworks
  • Proficient in at least one modern cloud data platform
  • Expertise in on prem/cloud infrastructure management
  • Experience working in agile development teams with good development practices
  • Expertise in NHS data models / data standards
  • Ability to effectively break down complex analyses for non-technical stakeholders
  • A strong desire to create real-world positive impacts for patients and the NHS

Desirable Criteria

  • Expertise in software engineering, including RESTful API development
  • Expertise in FHIR / HL7 development
  • Expertise working with NLP pipelines for unstructured medical records.
  • Experience working with Real-World Data or EHR databases
  • Experience building OMOP common data model pipelines

Main duties of the job

The Lead Data Engineer is a senior technical role that will:

  • Design and lead on technical objectives for the AI Centre and Health Data for London
  • Lead development of cloud data infrastructure and ELT pipelines across London hospitals and platforms
  • Work with a dedicated AI Centre team to deploy language AI technologies for extracting and standardising unstructured clinical records
  • Provide expert technical support for the standardisation of London data into research data models
  • Co-ordinate, support, and upskill local analysts/engineers in cross-London collaborations to ensure alignment on projects and timelines
  • Build robust technical solutions for automation of data pipelines and cohort creation for London research data delivery
  • Contribute to deployment architectures for live tools built on top of London data platforms
  • Contribute to academic publications, stakeholder presentations, and help to produce materials that support public, patient, and community engagement, such as blog posts

Working for our organisation

AI Centre for Value-Based Healthcare

The AI, Data & Digital Innovation directorate is made up of data and technology experts - based in GSTT but working closely as a team with KCH and KCL.

The team forms part of the Artificial Intelligence Centre for Value-Based Healthcare - a consortium of NHS, academic, and industry partners from across the UK. This consortium offers expert professional technical delivery across data engineering, data science & AI development, and software engineering. Programmes include region-wide infrastructure delivery of cloud and federated platforms, multi-modal Real-World Data engineering, foundation model development, and development of different Language AI solutions.

London / GSTT Snowflake Platform

A secure data and research cloud platform that provides access to some of the broadest and deepest data in the NHS, including low latency patient-level data flows from primary care, linked to Acute Trust data.

Secure Data Environment (SDE) for London 

The London SDE is a data, research, and analytics ecosystem that unites data across the London region. It includes Health Data for London are the next iteration of this programme, delivering one of the best and most diverse research data assets in the world that links data across care pathways for more than 10 million patients. The AI Centreis commissioned to deliver multi-modal data integrations for Health Data for London.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

The Lead Data Engineer will be responsible for:

  • Owning the building of SQL/Python pipelines (primarily in Snowflake and dbt) to extract data from different databases and raw sources, ending in generation of cohorts for research, analysis, and machine learning
  • Designing and leading programmes related to ingestion and standardisation of structured and unstructured data within London programme
  • Ensuring technical outputs of such projects meet deliverables of Health Data for London
  • Owning the design and development of data outputs for customers inside the NHS Trust and users of the London SDE
  • Leading engagement with technical teams in NHS Hospital Trusts, to build consensus and drive collaboration
  • Chairing meetings and technical workshops to update work packages across a complex multi-stakeholder and multi-institution environment across London
  • Supporting, supervising, and upskilling more junior team members, either within the SDE programme, or within other NHS analytics teams, through oversight of per-project technical work and outputs
  • Maintaining a central repository of reproducible code based on a common data model shared across London regions

Person specification

Qualifications / Education

Essential criteria
  • Relevant technical degree (undergraduate or postgraduate)

Knowledge & experience

Essential criteria
  • Experience working in agile development teams with good development practices, including CI/CD, unit testing, version control
  • Expertise in NHS data models (e.g. EHR data, SUS, HES, EMIS/TPP primary care data) and NHS data standards (e.g. SNOMED-CT, ICD-10)
  • Ability to effectively break down complex analyses for non-technical stakeholders
  • A strong desire to create real-world positive impacts for patients and the NHS, across themes such as healthcare inequalities, long-term conditions, and cancer care.
Desirable criteria
  • Experience working with Real-World Data or EHR databases
  • Experience building OMOP common data model pipelines

Technical Expertise

Essential criteria
  • Proficient in SQL, dbt, Python, and orchestration frameworks
  • Proficient in at least one modern cloud data platform (e.g. Snowflake / Databricks / Big Query)
  • Expertise in on premise and cloud infrastructure management
Desirable criteria
  • Expertise in software engineering, including RESTful API development
  • Expertise in FHIR / HL7 development
  • Expertise working with natural language processing pipelines, including for entity extraction from unstructured medical records.

Employer certification / accreditation badges

Timewise helps businesses to attract and develop the best talent through flexible working.Care quality commission - GoodDisability confident employer

Documents to download

Apply online now

Further details / informal visits contact

Name
Joe Zhang
Job title
Chief Technology Officer
Email address
[email protected]
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