Location
Hybrid working based at any of UKHSA's Core HQs: Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and London. Hybrid model requires a minimum of 60% of contractual hours (approximately 3 days a week pro rata) spent at a core HQ, with the remainder working from home.

Hours
Full Time, standard working hours with flexible working patterns available.

Salary
Senior Executive Officer (SEO) Grade:
£41,983 - £48,128 (National)
£44,148 - £50,121 (Outer London)
£46,310 - £52,113 (Inner London)

About the Role
The Senior Scientist role is within the Rapid Investigation Team, part of Field Services at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). UKHSA leads the prevention, preparedness, and response to infectious diseases and environmental hazards to protect public health and build national health security capability.

This role involves providing epidemiological and data management support across multiple topic areas, supporting the investigation of infectious disease incidents and outbreaks, and working closely with senior epidemiologists, local Health Protection Teams, and external partners.

Key responsibilities include managing technical and analytical aspects of outbreak investigations, developing reproducible analytical pipelines primarily using R programming, and contributing to operational and academic research including publications and conference presentations.

The role requires strong collaboration with local, regional, national colleagues and external stakeholders, and may involve national deployments. It also includes supporting quality assurance, governance, and training activities within the team.

UKHSA promotes an inclusive culture valuing diversity and equality, encouraging applications from all backgrounds.

Experience
- Demonstrable experience in public health, health protection, or epidemiology.
- Experience interpreting and evaluating epidemiological and sensitive health data.
- Proven ability to conduct complex statistical analyses and epidemiological investigations.
- Experience with surveillance systems, data management, data security, and quality assurance.
- Proficient in statistical/database/mapping tools such as R, STATA, GIS, network analysis, SQL.
- Experience in project management, research study delivery, and presenting scientific findings.
- Ability to lead and supervise technical and analytical outbreak investigation tasks.

About you
- Strong analytical and coding skills, particularly in R programming.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work effectively with multidisciplinary teams and external partners.
- Motivated to contribute to public health surveillance, outbreak response, and research.
- Ability to manage competing priorities and work under pressure during incident responses.
- Commitment to promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace.
- Willingness to undertake national deployments as required.

Qualifications
- Educated to at least bachelor's degree level in a relevant subject or equivalent experience.
- MSc or equivalent in Epidemiology, Public Health, or allied discipline preferred.
- Knowledge of epidemiological principles, surveillance practices, and statistical methods.
- Understanding of information governance, data quality, and audit processes.
- Security clearance at Basic Personnel Security Standard required prior to appointment.