Senior Full Stack Engineer

AstraZeneca are looking for Senior Full Stack Engineers to help build and enhance our next generation Drug Discovery platform! We are investing heavily in our Augmented Drug Design-Make-Test and Analyse (DMTA) platforms as we seek to deliver better, differentiated Candidate Drugs into trials, faster, for greater patient benefit. We have made great strides in creating the AI and ML toolsets that will pave the way for this transformation and platforms supporting new therapeutic modalities. The next part of this journey will involve firming up our existing toolsets and building the applications that will enable us to maximise the value of our new technologies in bringing small molecule and other therapeutic modalities (e.g. peptides, oligonucleotides and conjugates) through the funnel.

In Early Science, we have highly skilled scientists generating ideas and performing experiments in the support of complex drug discovery projects. Our environment is driven by scientific and technical innovation with a high degree of diversity in workflows, data, vendor solutions and in-house builds.

About the role
Working alongside Software and Data Engineers, Architects and other IT and science partners, you will devise technical solutions, estimate and deliver high value returns in our DevOps teams to some of the most challenging issues slowing down innovation. You will utilize your technical acuity to troubleshoot and provide innovative solutions to ensure smooth experiences for our users, as well as make recommendations with peers on how we can move forward.

Your work will have a direct impact on the science we do, and the opportunity to enable our scientists to undertake science not possible today.

We're an expanding global development team which is migrating as close to as we can to a true DevOps model. The Portfolio is a mixture of unique self-developed and Commercial Off the Shelf Software (COTS) solutions. It's a siloed environment and you have the challenge and opportunity to make the back end systems and front end user experience seamless in a realm of dynamic requirements and needs.

Responsibilities
The role is accountable for ensuring that best practices are followed in the constant software development struggle of juggling between legacy and pioneering, as well as offering forward thinking ideas and solutions to continually close that gap.

You will:

* Work with pods of engineers, distributed across multiple locations that consistently and iteratively delivers high-impact, high-quality solutions while maintaining high quality operations
* Work across legacy systems and brand new in all aspects such as the data layer, middleware, application, UI, and everything in between
* Work with project teams integrating new software with old, in house with COTS, and making the suggestions that have an impact on those ratios, and thus the platform itself
* Advocate and advance modern, agile software development practices and help develop and promote a vibrant software engineering culture
* Mentoring and providing feedback to more junior engineers

Requirements
The role needs senior level technical skills, and we consider the below crucial capabilities:

* Deep expertise in languages like Java, with the willingness and ability to quickly ramp up on new ones as required.
* Experience in at least one major development framework, from Spring to Lagom and beyond
* Strong front end skills using JavaScript and demonstrable experience in a front end framework like Vue.js, or React. Additional skills in CSS as well as some related CSS framework like Bootstrap, or TailwindCSS
* Solid experience in relational and/or NoSQL databases (bonus points for Oracle, Postgres, and/or Cassandra)
* Proficiency in *nix environments
* High proficiency in data structures and design patterns, as well as associated anti-patterns. Be able to defend, compare, and contrast these decisions
* Experience in cloud services and tools (e.g. AWS services such as S3, Redshift, lambda, DMS)
* Excellent unit testing practices using proper software architectures to make those tests possible
* CI/CD experience with some automation tooling like Jenkins, TravisCI, Bitbucket Pipelines, etc
* Experience of data analysis - profiling, investigating, interpreting and documenting data structures,
* Attention to detail and the ability to follow standards while contributing to the evolution of standards themselves
* Excellent teamworking skills
* Excellent verbal and written communication skills
* A critical thinking approach and the capacity to propose solutions, not just highlight problems
* The desire to engineer rather than just write code
* An always learning, never complacent demeanour when it comes to what you do best

The following skills would be useful but are not crucial:

* Experience with Vagrant and Docker
* Experience in microservices
* Experience with message queuing (RabbitMQ, SQS, etc)
* Experience with CM tools like Ansible, Chef, etc
* Strong willingness to guide and educate peers and beyond on what you do and how you do it

Why AstraZeneca?
At AstraZeneca when we see an opportunity for change, we seize it and make it happen, because any opportunity no matter how small, can be the start of something big.

So, what's next? Are you ready to bring new ideas and fresh thinking to the table? Brilliant! We have one seat available, and we hope it's yours. Hit Apply today!