Data Engineer

About EIT: 

The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) Oxford’s purpose is to have a global impact by fundamentally reimagining the way science and technology translate into end-to-end solutions and delivering these solutions in programmes and platforms that respond to humanity’s most challenging problems. 

EIT Oxford will ensure scientific discoveries and pioneering science are turned into products for the benefit of society that can have high-impact worldwide and, over time, be commercialised to ensure long-term sustainability. 

Led by a faculty of world experts, EIT seeks to solve the world’s most challenging problems across four high-risk, high-reward, high-impact humane endeavours: health and medical science; food security and sustainable agriculture; climate change and clean energy; and artificial intelligence & robotics. 

EIT Oxford is investing significant resources in a new world-class research and development facility in the Oxford Science Park. Set for completion in 2027, the state-of-the-art campus includes 300,000 sq ft of research laboratories, an oncology and preventative care clinic, and educational and meeting spaces. Together, they create the perfect environment for EIT Oxford experts to take ground-breaking ideas from research to broad implementation. The new facility will further EIT’s current partnership with the University of Oxford and become the new home for Ellison Scholars. 

EIT Oxford is committed to cultivating a community where excellence is achieved through collaboration, trust, innovation and tenacity. We foster an environment where everyone’s experience and expertise are valued. We are curious and resilient in our efforts to drive long-term, sustainable innovation to meet humanity’s most enduring challenges. 

Requirements

The Role:

Our Data Engineering Team builds the core data systems that power frontier research across EIT. As an early member of our Data Engineering team, you’ll design and build the platforms used by scientists and engineers in fields such as healthcare, robotics, agriculture, and AI. You’ll work alongside our MLOps and Infrastructure teams to create reliable, scalable systems capable of handling large-scale (from TB to PB+), multimodal datasets. 

EIT is unique in combining foundational data from diverse disciplines into a single research ecosystem. You’ll help develop the technical foundation that makes this possible: platforms, services, APIs and distributed systems that are robust, observable and easy to work with. This is a role for engineers who think long-term and want to build a platform that will underpin the next generation of scientific and technological discovery.

Day-to-Day, You Might:

• Design and build distributed data systems that support research across EIT’s scientific domains. 

• Architect APIs and services for high-throughput, low-latency access to multimodal datasets. 

• Work with MLOps, Infrastructure and data engineers embedded within research teams to integrate systems into active research workflows. 

• Develop pipelines for large-scale text, audio, video, imaging, sensor, and structured data on OCI. 

• Add observability, monitoring, and automated quality checks to ensure the trustworthiness of every dataset. 

• Contribute to an engineering culture that values maintainability, testing, clear system design, and deep collaboration with our researchers and scientists. 

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• You have strong programming experience in Python and SQL, and value code quality, reliability (including testing, CI/CD) and observability as much as performance. 

• You have experience designing, deploying, and optimising distributed data systems or data-intensive backend services. 

• You think in terms of systems and longevity, not just one-off ETL scripts, and embrace end-to-end ownership from low-level performance to user interfaces. 

• You’re a collaborative partner to Infrastructure/Ops teams and researchers; clear, respectful communicator. 

• You have a low-ego, team-first mindset and help grow our engineering culture by mentoring, sharing, and elevating the work of those around you. 

Great to Also Have 

Nobody checks every box - if you’re not sure if you’re qualified, we still encourage you to apply. 

• You’re used to working with modern tech stacks and developing for distributed systems, for example Spark/Flink/Kafka, Polars/Arrow, Airflow/Prefect. 

• You’ve contributed to shared Python libraries used across multiple teams and maintained dependency and packaging standards (e.g. Poetry, pip-tools). 

• You have experience integrating multimodal datasets (text, video, imaging, sensor data) into unified platforms. 

• You’ve designed and optimised robust, high-performance APIs for data ingestion/consumption using tools such as FastAPI, gRPC, and GraphQL, and use tools such as Prometheus and OpenTelemetry to maintain SLAs. 

• You’re curious about database internals, storage engines, and low-latency query processing. 

• You’ve built web apps and dashboards using tools such as Dash or frameworks like React. 

• You’ve managed schema evolution, data versioning, and governance in production with tools such as Open Policy Agent and Apache Hive Metastore. 

Benefits

We offer the following salary and benefits:

Enhanced holiday pay

Pension

Life Assurance

Income Protection

Private Medical Insurance

Hospital Cash Plan

Therapy Services

Perk Box

Electric Car Scheme

Why work for EIT:

At the Ellison Institute, we believe a collaborative, inclusive team is key to our success. We are building a supportive environment where creative risks are encouraged, and everyone feels heard. Valuing emotional intelligence, empathy, respect, and resilience, we encourage people to be curious and to have a shared commitment to excellence. Join us and make an impact!