Genomics Bioinformatics Software Engineer

£56,185 - £70,566

per annum, pro rata

A Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

Alongside your salary of £56,185, UK Health Security Agency contributes £16,276 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

We pride ourselves as being an employer of choice, where Everyone Matters promoting equality of opportunity to actively encourage applications from everyone, including groups currently underrepresented in our workforce.

UKHSA ethos is to be an inclusive organisation for all our staff and stakeholders. To create, nurture and sustain an inclusive culture, where differences drive innovative solutions to meet the needs of our workforce and wider communities. We do this through celebrating and protecting differences by removing barriers and promoting equity and equality of opportunity for all.

If you are successful at interview, and are moving from another government department, NHS, or Local Authority, the relevant starting salary principles for level transfers or promotions will apply. Otherwise, roles are offered at the pay scale minimum for the grade, but in exceptional circumstances there may be flexibility if you are able to demonstrate you are already in receipt of an existing, higher salary. Pay increases are through the relevant annual pay award for the role and terms.

Please be aware that the salary is based on the office location.

Grade 7

• £56,185- £66,581 (National)
• £58,340- £68,574 (Outer London)
• £60,494- £70,566 (Inner London)

External: This vacancy is open to all external applicants (anyone) from outside the Civil Service as well as internal applicants.

If this role is fixed term and you are not currently a Civil Servant, you will take up the post on a Fixed Term appointment; you may be able to take this role up as a Secondment. If you are an existing Civil Servant, based outside of UKHSA, you will take up the post as a loan which you will need your department to agree. Loans are normally agreed for a period of two years. However, this may be extended where required, subject to agreement between UKHSA and your home department. You cannot take the post up as a fixed term. If you are an existing UKHSA member of staff, you will take up the post as either a level transfer or a temporary promotion as per the UKHSA's Pay policy.

If this role is permanent, it may also be available as a loan (for existing Civil Servants only) or secondment arrangement, subject to business need and agreement from the hiring manager and, where applicable, the employee's home organisation.

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

The genomics team support the delivery of the UKHSA Pathogen Genomics service which comprise of a high throughput, distributed sequencing capability. The sequencing capability was developed to support the COVID pandemic response and delivery of the pathogen genomics programme.

The work of the Pathogen Genomics service is to support UKHSA's genomics surveillance programmes, to aid detection of outbreaks and transmission of infections, to characterise and correlate genomics to virulence and antimicrobial resistance mechanisms, and generate evidence to support effective interventions, all within the wider UKHSA objective, to significantly reduce their overall public health burden.

• Contribute to the development and implementation of a strategy, jointly with partners, for creating software processes for WGS processing, analysis, reporting and storage within UKHSA.
• To design and deploy processes to collect and report business intelligence information in real-time using SQL databases and dashboarding tools.
• To support delivery of routine WGS-based services including managing issues and tickets raised by customers.
• To coordinate the UKHSA contribution to development of new software and design with appropriate architecture for more efficient and scalable ways of automated processing, analysis, interpretation and visualisation of sequence and epidemiological data.
• To work with bioinformatics colleagues to migrate, as appropriate, current analytical pipelines to the new architecture for software solutions.
• To ensure best practice for software development, testing and implementation is followed in the WGS Development and Implementation Service and across UKHSA.
• To ensure compliance with quality procedures and achieve appropriately recognised software accreditation
• To support software improvements required to enhance current UKHSA service delivery.

• The role is National and may involve travel to UKHSA locations in England for some meetings and site visits.
• The above is only an outline of the tasks, responsibilities and outcomes required of the role. You will carry out any other duties as may reasonably be required by your line manager.
• The job description and person specification may be reviewed on an ongoing basis in accordance with the changing needs of the division and UKHSA.
• It should be noted that the work of the division is of a confidential nature and must not be communicated to other persons except where required for authorised purposes.

Fixed term
Loan
Secondment

24 months from start date

Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time

Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, London - Canary Wharf (Core HQs)

This role is being offered as hybrid working based at any of our Core HQs. We offer great flexible working opportunities at UKHSA and operate using a hybrid working model where business needs allow. This provides us with greater flexibility about how and where we work, to get the best from our workforce. As a hybrid worker, you will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of your contractual working hours (approximately 3 days a week pro rata, averaged over a month) working at one of UKHSA's core HQs (Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and London). Our core HQ offices are modern and newly refurbished with excellent city centre transport links and benefit from co-location with other government departments such as the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC).

Apply before 11:55 pm on Wednesday 11th November 2026

Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

486947

Grade 7

Information Technology
Science
Other

1

• Identify, discuss and action own professional performance and training / development needs with your line manager through appraisal / individual development plan. Attending internal / external training events
• To participate in all mandatory training as required, i.e., fire safety, information governance and all other mandatory training.

We are looking for a capable, highly motivated software developer with experience in designing / interacting with genomic software solutions (bioinformatics pipelines).

The priority is to deliver on the strategic aim of developing unified informatics solutions for assembling, analysing and reporting WGS results. This needs to be fit-for-purpose for a wide range of bacterial, viral and fungal pathogens and builds on extensive work establishing bespoke and successful routine WGS-based services for several key infectious disease agents. Solutions will need to be scalable and cope with high-throughput sequence processing yielding actionable information for public health and patient centred management. Solutions should also collect and report business intelligence information in real-time using SQL databases and dashboarding tools.

We require interfaces using modern web technologies & frameworks, so we have a broad range of software development challenges for the right person. A key activity is the establishment and deployment of robust and often novel analytical pipelines developed to a standard, which will meet necessary ISO standards and achieve UKAS accreditation.

The software needs to be fully documented, modular, version-controlled and incorporated into a workflow with containerization. The software will need to be flexibly developed so it can be variably hosted on a range of computational environments including UKHSA's high performance computer cluster, EBI and commercial cloud providers such as Amazon or Azure.

The software will need to be developed in line with the needs of users and have applications to not only support UKHSA, but partner users such as the Devolved Administrations, Animal and Plant Agency and international users.

Implement software solutions for visualization of genomic analyses linked to epidemiological and geospatial data for the better management of outbreaks.

Dissemination of software code will be through UKHSA GitLab and GitHub repositories Provision of software engineering support and training across the Agency and beyond. The division is committed to working flexibly and collaboratively as part of a close team and will ensure the successful individual is supported to deliver challenging tasks that will enable them to progress within their career.

This list is not exhaustive.

Successful candidates must pass a basic disclosure and barring security check before they can be appointed.

Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is Basic Personnel Security Standard

If more than the required number of suitable candidates pass the interview criteria, you may be kept on a reserve list for 12 months subject to your agreement. You may be contacted, in merit-order, if similar roles with closely matching essential criteria become available and the department choose to appoint from a reserve list.The panel will assess if candidates meet the requirement of the role first, using a specific benchmark system. If you are interviewed for the post and do not meet the required threshold for the specified grade, your application may be assessed against a similar, lower grade role and you may be offered the post should one be available.

From time to time, the role holder may be required to support UKHSA's incident response activity by contributing their appropriate expertise within an Incident Cell; during such periods, supported by the line manager, this work will take priority over normal day-to-day responsibilities, commensurate with their grade, skills and experience.

Future location

UKHSA is investing in a new state-of-the-art National Biosecurity Centre in Harlow, Essex, which will eventually bring together teams currently based at Canary Wharf, Colindale and Porton Down. For more details, please see: Huge biosecurity centre investment to boost pandemic protection - GOV.UK.

The new facilities will start becoming operational in the mid-2030s, with full completion by 2038. Staff will move in phases as facilities become available. If you're appointed to a role currently based at Canary Wharf, Colindale or Porton Down, please note that we'll continue investing in these sites for the next decade. As we get closer to the transition, we'll provide full information about relocation support available to staff.

If you have spent more than 6 months abroad over the last 3 years you may need an International Police Check. This would not necessarily have to be in a single block, and it could be time accrued over that period.

If successful for this role as one aspect of pre-employment screening, applicant's personal details - name, national insurance number and date of birth - will be checked against the Cabinet Office Internal Fraud Hub and anyone included on the database will be refused employment unless they can show exceptional circumstances. Currently this is only for External candidates to the Civil Service.

Please visit our careers site for more information https://gov.uk/ukhsa/careers

Please note: The Digital and Data Directorate, where this role sits, is reviewing its Target Operating Model. While the process is still in the planning stage, some roles may be affected by future changes. We are committed to keeping candidates informed and will share updates as they become available.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Successful candidates must undergo a basic (or equivalent) criminal record check.

People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

• Name : Nigel Poole
• Email : Nigel.Poole@ukhsa.gov.uk

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