Software Engineer - Integration

Job Description

We are seeking a talented Software Engineer to join our Integration Development team. The successful candidate will play a key role in strengthening the systems and workflows that tie MinKNOW’s components together, improving the developer experience across instrument software, and increasing overall product robustness through integration testing, packaging, and standardisation.

The Details…

This is an exciting role and chance to join a cutting-edge, fast-paced organisation with opportunities to utilise new technology and influence change. This role will suit someone with excellent interpersonal skills with a strong vision and focus on delivery and who has an appreciation for science and the scientific method.

Key Responsibilities

Integration Engineering & Developer Experience

• Own and improve the integration layer between MinKNOW components to reduce friction for feature teams.
• Design and deliver developer tooling to simplify local development, debugging, test execution, and release workflows.
• Identify recurring cross-team problems and roll out standard patterns, libraries, or templates to solve them.
  
  
  

Reliability, Testing & Quality

• Develop and maintain comprehensive integration test suites that validate behaviour across components and platforms.
• Improve robustness by strengthening CI feedback loops, test coverage, and failure diagnostics.
• Help define and enforce quality gates that improve confidence in releases.
  
  
  

Packaging, Release & Build Systems

• Package MinKNOW for Linux across required configurations, ensuring correctness, reproducibility, and performance.
• Maintain and evolve build systems and dependency management.
• Standardise build environments using Docker, and evolve CI/CD pipelines in GitLab for speed and reliability.
  
  
  

Specifications, Standards & Cross-Team Alignment

• Contribute to creation and maintenance of specifications such as telemetry schemas, file output formats, and technical documentation.
• Collaborate closely with component teams to align on interfaces, integration contracts, and release readiness.
• Raise current integration challenges
• Discuss and approve Integration Development projects
• Evaluate progress and schedule priorities
  
  
  

Operational Support & Continuous Improvement

• Tackle complex integration issues and provide senior-level support to internal users and development teams.
• Improve observability and troubleshooting via metrics, dashboards, and actionable logging.
• Raise team delivery standards through better documentation, improved processes, and pragmatic automation.
  
  
  

What We're Looking For…

In this role, you’ll enjoy operating at the intersection of software engineering and build/infrastructure, lead technical delivery across team boundaries, and turn ambiguous integration problems into reliable, repeatable solutions.

Required Skills

• Strong software engineering background with excellent Python skills and experience using the broader Python ecosystem.
• Experience with Linux packaging and distribution for complex software products, including managing dependencies, reproducible builds, versioning, and shipping multiple configurations.
• Strong experience with containerised development/build environments (Docker), including building images, maintaining reproducible environments, and using containers in CI pipelines.

Strong CI/CD experience and collaborative development practices (merge requests, code review, coding standards), ideally in GitLab.

Strong debugging and systems thinking: able to diagnose issues across multi-component systems.

Experience in the following areas, or a strong willingness to learn, would be advantageous:

Observability experience: metrics, dashboards, actionable logging, and improving failure diagnostics.

Experience with web technologies.

Experience with telemetry schemas, interface contracts, file formats, or other technical specifications.

Please note that no terminology in this advert is intended to discriminate on the grounds of a person's gender, marital status, race, religion, colour, age, disability or sexual orientation. Every candidate will be assessed only in accordance with their merits, qualifications and abilities to perform the duties of the job.

Same Posting Description for Internal and External Candidates

About Us

Oxford Nanopore Technologies: Our goal is to bring the widest benefits to society through enabling the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere. The company has developed a new generation of nanopore-based sensing technology for faster, information rich, accessible and affordable molecular analysis. The first application is DNA/RNA sequencing, and the technology is in development for the analysis of other types of molecules including pr

oteins. The technology is used to understand and characterise the biology of humans and diseases such as cancer, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses, and whole environments. With a thriving culture of ambition and strong innovation goals, Oxford Nanopore is a UK headquartered company with global operations and customers in more than 125 countries.