Django Developer Full-time

Wanted: Django developer with an interest in Health Care

We are the Evidence-Based Medicine DataLab, at the University of Oxford, led by Dr Ben Goldacre.

We’re a close team of software engineers, academics, and clinicians. We produce neat, high-impact tools from data. We use exciting and challenging data science under the bonnet, but aim to make our tools friendly to users. But… we also have a growing pipeline, so we need more coders!

Our work is around two themes:

Promoting better use of patient data, by building useful real-world tools like OpenPrescribing and more.

Promoting better research, by building tools to spotlight unreported clinical trials, conflicts of interest, bad transparency policies, and more.

We produce high impact academic papers. We build innovative, live software tools. And then we use these to campaign for better use of data in science and medicine.

We want to expand our group of regular contractors, with the potential for longer-term employment in the future. Specifically we are looking for a Python developer to work across all our outputs, but mainly focused on OpenPrescribing.

Our platform is Django + postgres, running on a single VM. We farm out computationally expensive work to Google BigQuery (e.g. for complex queries that scan all 90GB of processed prescribing data). We generate charts using HighCharts. We mostly work remotely but meet twice a month in Oxford. Our users love the service – typical feedback:

“Thank you very much for launching this service, which is incredibly helpful for those of us who have been trying to access practice level NHS prescription data but found ourselves stuck because of the size of the data!”

OpenPrescribing is designed to help health professionals who work with prescribing to interpret the large amounts of data generated by the system each month. New features are researched and chosen in collaboration with our team of academics. We are motivated by finding novel ways to present data, find interesting signals, and make the information directly relevant to individuals in GP Practices or CCGs; for example, using statistical process control techniques to generate custom alert emails.

You’ll be a good fit for this role if you:

• Love statistics and visualisation
• Have an interest in healthcare, how the pharma industry works, or randomised controlled trials
• Enjoy the idea of working at the University of Oxford in a smart mixed team
• Are expert in Django and python (preferably with some experience in “big data”)
• Enjoy having responsibility for complex apps: this means maintenance as well as new features

In addition to working on OpenPrescribing, you are likely to be involved in our research integrity projects. These typically involve an amount of scraping and data processing, making nimble, data-driven websites, and collaborating on statistical analyses with academic colleagues.

If you’re interested please send a CV to hello@ebmdatalab.net.