Software Engineer

Salary: £31,236.00 - £34,610.00  per annum

Newcastle University is a great place to work, with excellent benefits. We have a generous holiday package; plus the opportunity to buy more, great pension schemes and a number of health and wellbeing initiatives to support you.

Closing Date: 16 February 2026

Introduction

The NIHR Innovation Observatory (IO) is a world-leading health and care innovation horizon scanning research centre based at Newcastle University. Our work supports government agencies, industry, regulators, charities, and researchers by delivering timely, actionable insights that inform strategic decision-making, policy development, investment guidance, funding programs and improve alignment across agencies. We work across the health, life sciences and wider care ecosystem to identify innovation, gaps and unmet needs, follow trends and signal potentially game changing innovations. Our work fosters national and international collaboration supporting the growth of the UK health and life sciences sector, and is a beacon for cross-sector, interdisciplinary training and capacity building in horizon scanning and foresight. We are at the forefront of developing approaches and people to identify and analyse emerging health and care technologies, ensuring the UK is prepared to leverage scientific breakthroughs that improve patient outcomes and support system readiness.

You will have a responsibility for promoting the values of the NIHR Innovation Observatory through appropriate and visible leadership behaviours and actions. You will have a particular responsibility to:

• Teamwork: Collaborate with kindness, value and respecting everyone, offering help and support.  Actively promoting an open flow of information and seeking to partner with external interest holders/stakeholders in all our activities.
• Courage and Ambition: Operate at the top of your game, valuing and actively seeking out learning and development opportunities. Giving and receiving feedback with honesty and reflecting on your approaches.
• Curiosity and Open-mindedness: Embrace creativity and value originality, seizing opportunities to learn and innovate.
• Integrity and Quality: Walk the talk and be well-prepared and robust in your approach, delivering high quality timely outputs, and managing your time and resources effectively

The Role

We are recruiting a Software Engineer to join the NIHR Innovation Observatory (IO), based at Newcastle University. This is a hands-on role focused on delivering high-quality code as part of our in-house technical infrastructure team. You will play a key part in building OpenScan – our cloud-based data platform for managing health innovation data and shaping the applications that sit on top of it.

You’ll be joining a small, agile team working at the intersection of health data, research, and building systems that feed into national health policy and innovation tracking. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys writing clean, maintainable code, learning from others, and contributing to a technically ambitious but pragmatic build.

You will work closely with the Lead Software Engineer and Technical Project Manager to support the continuous development of OpenScan’s core infrastructure, particularly around data ingestion, processing, and backend integration.

The post is full time, fixed term until 31 March 2031.

For informal enquiries please contact Debra Jones at Debra.Jones@newcastle.ac.uk

Key Accountabilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend features in Python as part of OpenScan’s core infrastructure.
• Contribute to ingestion, crawling, and data processing pipelines.
• Work with NoSQL databases (e.g. MongoDB) and version control tools (GitHub).
• Help shape and improve coding practices as the platform matures.
• Collaborate with internal users to refine data flows and backend functionality.
• Support integration with frontend applications and application programming interface (API) endpoints.
• Contribute to continuous delivery through a Kanban-based workflow.
• Learn and engage with our evolving stack, including generative AI and modular application development.

This job description identifies the key responsibilities of the post. It is not an exhaustive list of duties and is subject to amendment as necessary, in consultation with the postholder.

The Person

Knowledge, Skills and Experience (Essential)

• Proficient in Python, with experience building real-world applications or systems.
• Experience with web scraping, data processing, or similar workflows.
• Familiarity with version control (e.g. Git/GitHub) and collaborative development.
• Working knowledge of cloud environments (ideally AWS).
• Strong attention to code quality, testing, and documentation.
• Willingness to learn and work across backend and infrastructure layers.
• Have an awareness of the principles of good project management, as deployed in a software development setting (e.g. Agile, Kanban etc).

Knowledge, Skills and Experience (Desirable)

• Experience working in research and innovation, public sector, or data-intensive environments.
• Familiarity with Atlas Search, Elasticsearch and/or search engine design.
• Exposure to frontend frameworks or tools (e.g., React, Streamlit) and templating within full-stack frameworks like Django.
• Interest in large language models and modern AI toolchains, including the use of agentic coding tools.
• Experience with health or policy-related data workflows.

Attributes and Behaviour

• Focused on building robust, practical systems that solve real problems.
• Communicates clearly across technical and non-technical contexts.
• Self-driven and receptive to feedback, with a strong appetite for learning.
• Contributes to a respectful, delivery-focused team culture.
• Ability to adhere to and contribute to the ongoing development, of all policies and processes across the Innovation Observatory.

Qualifications

• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science or a related field

Newcastle University is a global University where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.  As a University of Sanctuary, we aim to provide a welcoming place of safety for all, offering opportunities to people fleeing violence and persecution.

We are committed to being a fully inclusive university which actively recruits, supports and retains colleagues from all sectors of society.  We value diversity as well as celebrate, support and thrive on the contributions of all of our employees and the communities they represent.  We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer and encourage applications from individuals who can complement our existing teams, we believe that success is built on having teams whose backgrounds and experiences reflect the diversity of our university and student population.

At Newcastle University we hold a Gold Athena Swan award in recognition of our good employment practices for the advancement of gender equality.  We also hold a Race Equality Charter Bronze award in recognition of our work towards tackling race inequality in higher education REC.  We are a Disability Confident employer and will offer an interview to disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for the role as part of the offer and interview scheme.

In addition, we are a member of the Euraxess initiative supporting researchers in Europe. 

Requisition ID: 29018