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Senior Software Engineer (Python)

Senior Software Engineer (Python)

[fusion_builder_container type="flex" hundred_percent="no" equal_height_columns="no" menu_anchor="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" background_color="" background_image="" background_position="center center" background_repeat="no-repeat" fade="no" background_parallax="none" parallax_speed="0.3" video_mp4="" video_webm="" video_ogv="" video_url="" video_aspect_ratio="16:9" video_loop="yes" video_mute="yes" overlay_color="" video_preview_image="" border_color="" border_style="solid" padding_top="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" padding_right=""][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" layout="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_color="" border_style="solid" border_position="all" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" padding_top="" padding_right="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" margin_top="0px" margin_bottom="0px" class="" id="" animation_type="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_direction="left" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" center_content="no" last="true" min_height="" hover_type="none" link="" border_sizes_top="" border_sizes_bottom="" border_sizes_left="" border_sizes_right="" first="true"][fusion_text columns="" column_min_width="" column_spacing="" rule_style="" rule_size="" rule_color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" content_alignment_medium="" content_alignment_small="" content_alignment="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" sticky_display="normal,sticky" class="" id="" margin_top="" margin_right="" margin_bottom="" margin_left="" fusion_font_family_text_font="" fusion_font_variant_text_font="" font_size="" line_height="" letter_spacing="" text_transform="" text_color="" animation_type="" animation_direction="left" animation_color="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_delay="0" animation_offset=""] Senior Software Engineer (Python) About Gold Standard Phantoms: Gold Standard Phantoms (GSP) is an established spin-out company from University College London, operating within the medical imaging industry. We develop, manufacture and sell specialised test objects, called phantoms, and advanced image analysis software services for use in testing the performance of MRI scanners and ensure that they operate in a standardised way. Our devices are used by clinicians, medical physicists, and radiographers around the world, empowering them to improve the quality of the MRI images they produce to diagnose illness, and investigate and research disease and new therapies. The company is entering a new growth phase, with the planned release of new products in the pipeline, and is establishing a new base in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. This year, we will be developing a platform technology to address a limitation of MRI systems and by doing so, increase cancer diagnosis accuracy. Our success in this mission has the potential to improve cancer patient diagnosis, prognosis, and quality of live, whilst having huge savings benefits for worldwide healthcare systems. Role overview: We are currently looking for an experienced Python Developer to join our growing MedTech organisation made up of a team of engineers, scientists, and clinicians that are on a mission to enable medical imaging to move to a quantitative and reproducible scientific measurement methodology in order to revolutionise the field of radiology. Responsibilities include participating in all phases of the software development lifecycle, working within the product development team, assisting with the R&D and design of new products, as well as maintaining the product life cycle of existing products. You will play a key role in developing and releasing new technologies to all of our stakeholders, including our research and clinical customers, and even internally in the form of software tooling and IT infrastructure to help improve our productivity. If you’re a seasoned Python developer with a love for back-end technologies, we’d like to meet you. Your ultimate goal is to create high-quality products that meet an important clinical need. We are looking for someone who:

  • enjoys working in startup environments,
  • likes solving complex and interesting engineering problems,
  • thrives in taking a systematic and methodical, test-driven approach to solving problems to ensure future product success,
  • can develop and release software services,
  • can get our software in the hands of our customers and the rest of our team,
  • can help evolve our way of working. We aim to continuously improve,
  • has an appreciation for the requirement to take on an evolving set of responsibilities as our company grows,
  • wants to make a meaningful contribution to improving patient quality of life.
For this position, the following requirements apply:
  • solid Python developer with 3+ years of commercial product development experience,
  • experience in using GIT, Jira (or similar) and CI/DevOps,
  • is comfortable distributing and deploy software in one or more forms (microservices, Python wheels, command line/GUI executables, Git repos, etc),
  • attention to detail and a willingness to engage with our stakeholders.
In addition, we consider it an asset if you also have:
  • experience processing medical image file formats, such as DICOM or NIfTI, or interfacing with medical imaging platforms/infrastructure, such as PACS or XNAT.
  • experience integrating software with existing APIs/services, and/or writing services/APIs (REST, gRPC, GraphQL etc.),
  • experience with containers, container deployment and Linux,
  • comfort in setting up and managing IT systems (back-ups, file-sharing, system monitoring, proxys, remote access, etc) - do you run your own Homelab?
  • previous experience in microservices architectures,
  • has worked within an ISO 9001, ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 or ISO 13485 compliant quality management system,
  • experience working within an agile environment,
  • experienced in the development/deployment of software medical devices.
What's on offer:
  • salary commensurate with experience, up to £70,000
  • full-time permanent position with 25 days annual leave + bank holidays
  • Hours of work: 40 per week
  • hybrid working (2-3 days-a-week in the Sheffield office)
  • flexible working hours and start times
  • an allowance to help you set up your home office
  • budget for any relevant training or courses
  • an opportunity to join a rapidly growing team
  • share options as per our equity incentive plan
  • cycle to work scheme (Green Commute Initiative)
Apply today to be considered for this excellent opportunity! The post is available immediately. It will be offered subject to a probationary period of 6 months and satisfactory references. Application: When applying for this role, please provide your CV along with a cover letter and any examples you have of previous hands-on experience (GitHub portfolio if available). Submissions and direct enquiries about the position can be made to: jobs@goldstandardphantoms.com Our engineering values: Focus on the Product Key reading: The Product-Minded Software Engineer (Gergely Orosz) We should be viewing ourselves as “product engineers” or “product-minded engineers”, rather than software engineers/developers. Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. Choose Boring Technology Key reading: Boring Technology (Dan McKinley) Embrace Boredom! Good practice is to innovate when innovation is necessary, and not to innovate where it is not. If you are looking to use a technology, base this decision on the level of stability and maturity that this technology has achieved. Boring is not bad. MySQL is boring. PostgreSQL is boring. PHP is boring. Python is boring. Memcached is boring. Cron is boring. The nice thing about boringness is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood. Optimise Globally Adding technology to your company comes with a cost, therefore the “best tool for the job” is not always the optimal solution. It might be that the best tool for a particular job is to write a high-optimised library in C++, but we need to consider the long-term costs/risks of supporting C++ in our tech-stack. It might have been better to write the library in Python and deal with the optimisation issues elsewhere. It is basically always the case that the long-term costs of keeping a system working reliably vastly exceed any inconveniences you encounter while building it. Mature and productive developers understand this. Rapid Prototyping Key reading: Rapid Prototyping & Product Management (Tom Chi) Create a Culture of Learning
  • The culture of right and wrong is intrinsically diminishing, as you never focus on learning what made anything successful or unsuccessful. Instead, create a culture of learning, which is additive.
  • How many key learnings are you making as an organisation each week? Try to maximise this.
  • Avoid guess-a-thons, endless meetings where we discuss and argue product decisions using guesswork and conjecture. Don’t argue the truth of the uninvented invention. By rapidly prototyping actual experiences, we can shortcut all of that with real insight from real experiences.
Optimise Loop Length
  • Loop length is the amount of time between asserting a new conjecture and observing the actuals from that conjecture. Even if you’re releasing every day through continuous releases, but not learning anything from actuals from customers, that loop is open, and it needs to be closed.
Designing for adaptability vs. designing for scale
  • Most of the time, development is focused on stability and scalability, but they can also design for adaptability. So start any new product with a design for adaptability, with the understanding that most of this code will be thrown away. This allows you to decide what to do fast, and then focus on designing how to do it at scale.
Find the “Magic Moments”
  • Allow users to easily access the focal point of the product, and minimise any superfluous features or usability features that might detract from this.
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