Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford
Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford
Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford develops and applies science and technology to complex global challenges. Its interdisciplinary work spans health and medical science, food security and sustainable agriculture, climate change and clean energy, and government innovation. The Institute brings together research, technology, and practical implementation to help turn scientific progress into solutions with broad societal impact, including work connected to food and beverage, consulting, and logistics.

Data Engineer, Autonomous Systems — Oxford Hybrid

Build edge-to-cloud data infrastructure for autonomous scientific labs at the Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford. Support robotics telemetry, knowledge graphs, and machine-learning-ready datasets.

Description

  • Develop high-throughput, low-latency ingestion for live video, sensor telemetry, robot joint states, and instrument-control signals
  • Add validation at the edge before data is transmitted to the cloud
  • Work across edge devices, MQTT brokers, Kafka topics, cloud storage, and APIs
  • Transform robot states, instrument outputs, and video streams into structured database transactions
  • Create a knowledge graph that connects inputs to results and traces facts to source video segments and sensor readings
  • Define data formats, sampling, labelling, and provenance for model training and evaluation
  • Partner with AI researchers, software engineers, robotics engineers, and domain scientists
  • Support resilient system design, testing, rapid prototyping, and responsive engineering

Requirements

  • Demonstrated programming ability in Python
  • A strong focus on code quality, reliability, and performance
  • Experience owning systems end to end, from device output through to APIs
  • Experience with real-time data streaming, such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, or an equivalent technology
  • Understanding of high-frequency, low-latency data capture
  • Knowledge of reproducibility, version control, schema design, and data lineage
  • Clear, respectful communication and effective collaboration with scientists, roboticists, and researchers
  • Experience in automated laboratories or life sciences, including instrument APIs and lab protocols, is preferred
  • Experience building physical-system data pipelines for robotics, MQTT, autonomous vehicles, laboratory or clinical instruments, or industrial control is preferred
  • Knowledge of knowledge, entity, search, or continuously updated feed systems is preferred
  • Experience with stateful stream processing using Flink, Kafka Streams, Beam, or similar technologies, including event time, watermarks, and exactly-once processing, is preferred
  • Experience developing data ingestion and consumption APIs with FastAPI, gRPC, or GraphQL is preferred
  • Experience with graph stores and entity resolution or large-scale curation is preferred
  • Experience curating training or evaluation data or building model data systems is preferred
  • Permanent right to work in the UK

Benefits

  • Travel allowance
  • Bonus
  • 25 days of annual leave plus 8 bank holidays
  • An additional 3 days off between Christmas and New Year
  • The option to purchase 5 additional annual leave days in January and July
  • Pension with a 7.5% employer contribution and a minimum 5% employee contribution
  • Life assurance
  • Income protection
  • Private medical insurance for employees, partners, and dependants, including a hospital cash plan
  • Employee discounts
  • Electric car scheme
  • Nursery salary sacrifice scheme
  • Cycle to Work Scheme
  • Family planning support
  • Neurodiversity support, including advice and assessments
  • Coaching and therapy services

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