Senior Python Developer

Senior Backend Python Developer

About IQVIA Patient Finder

We live in a world where most information is readily available at our fingertips. You might be surprised to learn that the situation in hospitals is rather different. Systems used for electronic healthcare records (EHR) facilitate the clinical workflow, retrieving and storing information for each patient. There is, however, a large need for secondary usage of this data. Think of linking patients to clinical trials, medical research studies, and care quality assessment. For this purpose IQVIA has developed a search engine that enables medical professionals to find patient cohorts and collect data. In all that we do, we have the doctors and patients at the fore of our mind, and we also ensure to strictly adhere to privacy regulations. Patient Finder is currently used on a daily basis by 40+ hospitals in The Netherlands and in Belgium and expanding into other international markets.

The product is a scale-up within a larger corporation, meaning there is room to make your own mark and propose and work out creative solutions. The direction and view are largely determined, there is a clear vision on what we are as a company. Initial versions of the product have passed and now there is an established market for our product.

The role

We are seeking a skilled Senior Backend Software Engineer with Python background to join our Patient Finder software development team and develop components enabling training and execution of Machine Learning models against medical data.

Responsibilities

• You will work on ML-focused software which differentiate the application within the healthcare and medical research domains. This involves producing robust components which are deployable in Window-based and Linux-based environments, implementing new features both large and small, optimising existing functionality, resolving bugs, and defining software strategy.
• You will collaborate with other developers in ongoing improvement of the code, which includes expanding test coverage
• You will contribute to our documentation which covers processes, code, development- and deployment workflows, features and ongoing projects at various stages of completion
• You will review colleagues’ pull requests
• You will help refine our JIRA tickets from a technical perspective
• You will help investigate and resolve problems escalated by our support team

Opportunities

• You will be a part of innovation in the medical field, contributing to improved outcomes for healthcare patients and providers
• You will have the opportunity to be responsible for technical communication and preparation in cross-team projects. This will often mean online collaboration with international colleagues.
• You will be able to contribute ideas for the application both technical and non-technical (for example user interface improvements)
• You will sit closely with ML specialists and learn about ML, NLP, and MLOps
• Medical data is an interesting problem space, both in complexity and in societal value. The texts are a domain of its own with extremely high information density. It gives a real kick when users let us know they were able to collect data they were unable to use previously, such as finding people with a rare disease that might take years otherwise to diagnose or rapidly building quality datasets for COVID research.

Requirements

• You are a seasoned developer: you can translate (challenging) ideas into code, come up with just the right amount of abstraction, find your way around large unwieldy codebases, optimise for performance and readability, debug hard-to-reproduce problems and communicate about all these things with colleagues.
• You have worked as part of teams consisting of 4 or more developers and are used to having your ideas challenged and providing constructive criticism to others
• 5+ years of professional application development experience with Python
• Experience with development for Windows environments
• Experience with DevOps workflows, especially CI/CD
• Ability to autonomously make software architecture decisions
• Experience building APIs
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills
• You are based in Europe (no visa sponsorship available currently)

Nice to haves

• Experience with ML systems, deployments for inference
• Familiarity with Nuitka binary code compilation
• Experience with system administration (Unix/Linux) or DevOps
• Ability to manage Azure Cloud resources, especially for ML
• Experience heading (technical) projects and mentoring junior colleagues
• Experience working with colleagues from different cultural backgrounds
• Affinity with the medical domain
• You are based in Madrid, or the Netherlands. This is so that you can occasionally visit our office and join in-person team and company activities

About us

• The Patient Finder team consists of approximately 30 people organised across three development squads (AI/ML, Data, App), Deployment, Support and Consultancy.
• Our AI/ML team currently consists of 1 product owner and 4 developers (3 seniors) and is responsible for the ML systems powering the application.
• Patient Finder team is part of a larger healthcare product portfolio across the EMEA region, within the IQVIA business.
• Our team largely works from home but employees are free to choose between office, home, or hybrid work locations. We organise at least one team day in the office every month (to socialise with our colleagues).
• Our team is currently split between Madrid and Amsterdam.

Our stack

• Python, Docker and Docker-Compose containers, Make, Github Actions, Nuitka, PostgreSQL, Redis, Caddy, Azure ML

IQVIA is a leading global provider of clinical research services, commercial insights and healthcare intelligence to the life sciences and healthcare industries. We create intelligent connections to accelerate the development and commercialization of innovative medical treatments to help improve patient outcomes and population health worldwide. Learn more at https://jobs.iqvia.com