Senior Technical Product Manager (we have office locations in Cambridge, Leeds and London)

Job Description

Senior Technical Product Manager

Every genome sequenced through the NHS Genomic Medicine Service has to pass through complex bioinformatics workflows before it becomes a result a clinician can act on. Genie is the product that makes that happen.

Genie is our Nextflow-native workflow orchestrator. We built it in-house, and it now launches, runs and tracks the bioinformatics workflows behind the whole genome sequencing tests we provide to the NHS for rare disease and cancer, as well as national programmes such as the Generation Study, which is sequencing newborns' genomes to look for more than 200 rare genetic conditions. Those workflows form part of our regulated medical device. Genie is how they run, reliably and at national scale.

Genie has been built, launched and adopted. Its next stage is different: making it operationally excellent, scalable and sustainable as a product that the NHS relies on every day. That means bringing new tests and workflow improvements into service faster, keeping turnaround and reliability where clinicians need them as demand grows, and improving the economics of running each test, including its compute cost, so that genomic medicine can reach more patients.

As Senior Product Manager for Genie, you'll own that direction. You'll start from the problems that matter most to Genie's users, to patients and to Genomics England, and lead a multi-disciplinary team to solve them in ways that create lasting value.

Why this role matters

Real patients, national scale. England's Genomic Medicine Service was the first national health system to offer whole genome sequencing as part of routine care. Throughput, turnaround time, reliability and cost per test are not abstract metrics here. They affect how quickly families get answers and how quickly clinicians can act.

A product entering a new stage of its life. The important questions for Genie are now about scale, operability, cost and sustainability, alongside new capability. Deciding which problems to solve, in what order, and which to leave alone is the heart of the job.

A clear line to national strategy. Genomics England's strategy, the NHS 10 Year Health Plan and the UK Life Sciences Sector Plan all place genomics at the centre of future healthcare. Genie is part of the infrastructure that makes those ambitions deliverable, so its direction matters well beyond one team.

Rigour that matters. Genie runs workflows that are part of a regulated clinical service. Quality, traceability and safe change matter as much as new features, and good product decisions here respect both.

What you'll be doing

• Understand Genie's users and their problems in depth: the bio operations teams who run and monitor workflows every day, the bioinformatics teams (rare disease, cancer, newborns and more) whose workflows Genie runs, and the NHS services who depend on the results. Build that understanding from research, data and operational insight rather than assumption.

• Set and own Genie's product vision, strategy and roadmap, connected to Genomics England's strategy and to the healthcare service it supports. Make the priorities, the trade-offs and the things we are choosing not to do clear to everyone.

• Lead Genie through its move from a newly launched product to an operationally critical one: improving operational effectiveness, scalability and resilience, and reducing the cost of running each test, so that growing demand does not bring cost and risk with it at the same rate.

• Define the outcomes that matter, such as turnaround time, reliability, failure and rerun rates, cost per sample, and the time it takes to bring a new test or workflow version into service. Baseline them and use them to steer decisions.

• Bring in the right expertise at the right time. You'll work day-to-day with Genomic Data Scientists, bioinformaticians and software engineers, and you'll recognise when a problem needs user research, design, data analysis, clinical or scientific input, operations, quality or commercial colleagues, and involve them.

• Choose technology on its merits. Work with engineering to decide where to build, buy or reuse across Nextflow, AWS, container-based compute and the wider workflow ecosystem. That includes emerging technologies, AI among them, where they are the right fit for a real problem.

• Balance new capability, scaling, operational stability and technical debt, and be open about the trade-offs you make and why.

• Work within our quality management system and medical device processes, partnering with quality and regulatory colleagues so that change to Genie is safe and well evidenced.

• Contribute to the product community at Genomics England: share what you learn, support and challenge other product managers, and help raise the standard of product practice.

Who you'll work with

You'll report to the Group Product Manager for Bio Pipelines. The role has no direct reports. You'll lead through influence, across a cross-functional team and a wide group of stakeholders: bio operations, bioinformatics workflow teams, engineering, user research, design, quality and regulatory, clinical and scientific leads, and NHS partners. They won't all want the same things from Genie, and helping them reach a shared view of what matters most is a large part of the role.

What success looks like after 12 months

• Genie has a clear, agreed product vision and strategy, visibly linked to Genomics England's strategy.

• Decisions about Genie rest on a well-evidenced understanding of its users and their problems.

• There is a roadmap that stakeholders understand and trust, explicit about what we are not doing as well as what we are.

• A small set of outcome measures is baselined, used routinely, and shows progress on Genie's operational effectiveness and the cost of running tests.

• Bio operations, workflow teams and NHS partners can see where Genie is heading and how their needs shaped it.

About you

Above all, you're a product manager in the truest sense. You get deeply interested in problems before you get attached to solutions, and you judge success by the value created for users and for the organisation, not by the volume of what was shipped.

You're curious. You ask sharp questions, you're comfortable saying “I don't know yet”, and you treat that as the start of finding out. You don't need to have every answer yourself. You know the best outcomes come from bringing the right people together, and you're the person who frames the problem, assembles that expertise and leads the group to a good decision.

You're grounded about technology. You understand technical systems well enough to engage credibly with engineers and scientists, and you choose tools because they solve the problem, not because they are new.

You will likely have:

• A strong record in product management, with clear examples of taking a problem from discovery through to measurable outcomes, and the value your work created.

• Experience owning a technical product that other teams or services depend on, such as a platform, infrastructure, data, workflow or developer tooling product.

• A track record of turning organisational strategy into a product vision, and that vision into a roadmap with clear priorities and measurable outcomes.

• Experience working with user researchers, designers and other disciplines, and judgement about which methods and which expertise a problem needs.

• Experience managing a product through growth or scale, giving operability, reliability and cost the same attention as new features.

• The technical fluency to engage with topics such as cloud infrastructure, distributed compute, workflow systems and APIs. You don't need to write code, but you understand how these systems work and where the hard problems sit.

• Experience aligning many stakeholders with different needs, and making transparent prioritisation decisions that people trust, even when they don't get everything they asked for.

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