Backend Software Engineer - Pathogen

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we're on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity's greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you'll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society. Explore more .org.

Within this ecosystem, the Pathogen Project exemplifies EIT's dedication to ground-breaking science. It seeks to transform pathogen risk management, detection and response by leveraging Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS)-based metagenomic and pathogen-specific analytical tools. The goal is to power metagenomic devices using long-read sequencing technologies by building a comprehensive database of pathogen information to inform response. Enabled by Oracle Inc.'s cloud-computing scale and security, the Pathogen Project is advancing toward certified diagnostic tools for deployment in laboratories, hospitals, and public health organisations worldwide.

At EIT we are seeking an experienced and detail orientated Backend Software Engineer to build platform services that store and make data accessible within our platform. In this role, you will design and implement robust, resilient backend services, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.

You’ll work closely with a cross-functional team, including architects, platform engineers, and data engineers to create infrastructure that enables EIT's scientists to easily find and access the data they need for groundbreaking bioinformatics pipelines and data products.

• Design, develop, and maintain highly performant, scalable, and secure backend services and APIs using technologies such as Python and NodeJS
• Collaborate with science teams, full-stack engineers, and data engineers to understand data requirements and integrate user needs into backend data services
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs to make platform data findable and accessible in line with FAIR principles
• Build APIs that support interoperability and federation for pathogen clinical diagnostics, epidemiology monitoring, and research
• Work with data engineers to create pipelines and processes for storing and transforming platform data for easy consumption
• Implement and manage data storage solutions, including data lakes, data warehouses, and databases (e.g., object storage, Oracle Autonomous Database, Postgre
  
  SQL)
• Support innovation by exploring new technologies such as vector databases for search and AI use cases
• Work with big data technologies like Kafka, Iceberg, and Parquet, as well as managed database technologies such as Postgre
  
  SQL and Oracle vector databases
• Operate, monitor, and maintain Oracle Cloud infrastructure to ensure backend services are highly available, scalable, and secure
• Collaborate with Dev Sec Ops  engineers to automate deployments and adopt best-practice CI/CD
• Document and communicate APIs to engineers and bioinformaticians so they can build pipelines and user-facing data products effectively
• Provide technical standards for backend engineers to deliver clean, standardized, maintainable, testable, and reusable code
• Ensure solutions are documented and aligned with defined architecture governance processes
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to maintain platform health and performance

• Proven experience as a backend cloud engineer, data engineer, or similar role
• Proficiency in backend programming languages and API frameworks (Python, NodeJS, Django, FastAPI)
• Experience building flexible APIs using GraphQL
• Expertise in at least one cloud platform and its related managed…