Business Systems and Data Engineering

Genomic Surveillance Unit

We develop, deploy and support the digital systems and infrastructure that enables the Genomic Surveillance Unit to carry out its mission. We work closely with the Unit’s surveillance leads, service delivery function, external partners, collaborators and customers to provide the digital products, cloud infrastructure and technology stacks needed to store and share the data generated by surveillance activities. We also work closely with the GSU internal teams to support its internal operations and related products.

About us

We are a dynamic and diverse technology team of software developers, data engineers, quality assurance testers, product managers, development operations (DevOps) engineers and scrum masters who use agile methodologies to deliver and support quality software applications and digital products as part of the Genomic Surveillance Unit.

We work with surveillance leads and the operations team to understand the digital needs of our community, building the concept of ‘delivering value’ into everything we do. We aim to transform proof-of-concept developments into robust, production-ready, scalable digital products that support a wide variety of use cases wherever they are relevant.

Our work

Activities and projects actively supported by our team  include:

• The development and support of an internal web-based application and database that tracks and reports on the lifecycle of a positive COVID-19 sample, from registration of plate maps through to sequencing, and ultimately feeds a subset of data to the CLIMB database in collaboration with UKHSA.
• Development of a suite of software products for malaria parasite and mosquito surveillance as part of the MalariaGEN initiative.
• Infrastructure automation in cloud environments, migrating manually deployed systems to an automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, with effective monitoring and backups in place for redundancy purposes.
• Expanding our data engineering services, using the latest technologies to improve our data management, storage and messaging processes.

We are highly collaborative in approach and work together with teams across the Genomic Surveillance Unit to produce end-to-end digital products that support the goals of the Unit and its partners, customers, and funders.