We have an exciting new opportunity for a TRE (Trusted Research Environment) Lead to join the e-research department of one of our well-established clients in the heart of London. We are looking for a TRE Lead to design, deploy and support a new platform and service model, to help facilitate research using confidential and sensitive research data for our client.
This post presents a great opportunity to be one of the first recruits into a new team, with significant investment planned over the next 3 years. Our clients are at the start of a significant reboot of its e-Research function having invested £2,500,000+ over the past 18 months on core platforms for providing Cloud, Storage and HPC capabilities to its world-leading researchers. The TRE Lead will play a leadership role within e-Research, responsible for developing a mission-critical service for researchers at our client.
The TRE Lead will be responsible for designing the Trusted Research Environments which are to be implemented to support research using sensitive and identifiable data. Trusted Research Environments will be designed and implemented individually on a per-project or a per-group basis – the TRE Lead will be responsible for providing the system administration of this (predominantly) MS Windows infrastructure stack for these projects – ensuring that the platform is available, stable, secure and delivers to the expectations of the users. The TRE Lead will also be responsible for managing the user software stack required on the TRE platforms, including common CDMS systems such as REDCap and OpenClinica, as well as packages such as R, Stata, Python, etc.
The TRE Lead will be required to provide leadership, both within e-Research, as well as across our client’s research community. The TRE Lead will have the opportunity to grow a small team to ensure that the e-Research TRE services scale across the business and are delivered to a high-quality to users.
Responsibilities
As a TRE Lead below is a summary of some of the key responsibilities the TRE lead will have:
- Working with the rest of the e-Research Scientific Computing Infrastructure team to develop the TRE designs which are to be implemented within the existing infrastructure stack
- Assisting the implementation of TREs with the Scientific Computing Infrastructure team
- Leading the testing of the administrator- and user-functional capabilities of TREs, prior to them being accepted into production
- Leading the system administration and engineering of the TRE platforms – predominantly managing a MS Windows based infrastructure stack and user productivity platform
- Configuring TRE platforms for the specific needs of research groups
- Installing application stacks required by research groups (e.g., statistical analysis packages, etc)
- Patching and updating TRE platforms as required
- Monitoring the operational performance of the TRE tenancies, and responding to, and managing incidents arising on the platforms
- Supporting users with requests and incidents on the platform
- Installing, validating, patching, and updating the key TRE applications
- Providing 2nd-line support for users of the key TRE applications (e.g., providing advice, and debugging common user problems)
- Working with 3rd-line (vendor or user community) application support to resolve issues
- Reviewing, validating, and approving new application requests for installation on a TRE platform
- Consulting with research groups to understand their technical needs – what they are trying to do in their research project, and feeding this back to the e-Research team, e.g., addressing questions such as: (i) do we need more GPUs to support emerging projects? (ii) are our systems locked down enough? and (ii) what data interfaces are required across the business, etc.?
- Understanding the community best practice – i.e., what other groups are doing with TREs, in other universities and research centres
- Creating a technical review panel, or similar, of academics and research centre leads, for reviewing and validating research projects as fit for hosting on the TRE platform
- Developing processes and documentation (e.g., SOPs, in alignment with institutional SOPs) for the validation of the TRE platform and key applications managing research data
About you
Candidates must provide clear evidence of the following essential qualifications, experience, and knowledge, in their application:
- Degree in Computer Science, Informatics, Physical Sciences, Engineering, Computational Biology/Bioinformatics, or a relevant postgraduate qualification (e.g., MSc, PhD)
- Experience in previous roles of administering and managing a multi-user hypervisor-based MS Windows-based converged infrastructure including MS Windows Server, Windows File Server, VDI
- Experience of managing typical application stacks used in health informatics, clinical trials research, data science or the electronic data capture or management of sensitive data
- Experience implementing and managing a multi-user end-to-end IT infrastructure which is designed with the technical controls required to host confidential and sensitive data
- Experience of providing high-quality, high-performing operational support of research-IT/e-Research platforms, ensuring high-availability and high-levels of user satisfaction
- Knowledge and experience of typical workflows and pipelines (including both dataflow and user roles) for users in health informatics, clinical trials, or other disciplines dependent upon sensitive data hosted in a Trusted Research Environment or Data Safe Haven
- Experience of working in an environment governed by compliance guidelines or expectations from external bodies such as NHS Digital, MHRA, ISO27001, or equivalent
- Experience of administering infrastructure with private/public cloud and virtualisation technologies (e.g., OpenStack, VMWare, AWS, Azure)
- Experience developing scripts with both PowerShell and Python for facilitating system administration functions or processes
- Experience managing complex deployments or changes using project management and prioritisation skills
- Knowledge and experience of the current cyber security threat landscape, the mitigations, and best practices to adopt for a mission-critical infrastructure
- Experience of competency in managing a modern Linux-based infrastructure
- Experience of supporting audits of IT infrastructure and processes, carried out internally, or from external organisations
- Experience of building and supporting infrastructure for data science, or health informatics, including the use of deep learning and/or High-Performance Computing, and their associated applications stacks
