This is a very exciting opportunity for a data scientist to develop new modelling and machine learning techniques towards the analysis of the largest citizen data science programme of its kind in the world.

In March 2020, ZOE Global Limited, in collaboration with King’s College London, jointly launched the Covid-19 Symptom Study app (https://covid.joinzoe.com) to assist health planners manage the present pandemic. The app has also been launched in the USA and Sweden and our research consortium also includes Massachusetts General Hospital and Lund University. The app currently has over 4 million users across the UK, USA and Sweden and over 150 million daily reports. Research results from this work have already achieved strategic outcomes in helping the UK government to refine its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, including the inclusion of anosmia as a key COVID-19 symptom, the discovery of six distinct clusters of symptoms and the prediction on hospitalisation requirements for people exhibiting symptoms 5 days before event. Over the last 5 months, some of this work has already been published in major journals (Science, Lancet, Nature Medicine). These outcomes will have a profound impact on informing government and the NHS on future planning of resource management and care of patients during the ongoing pandemic. It has also the potential to shape an entirely new research programme and any virus management across a country through the development of mobile app technology combined with big data science.

The Covid-19 Symptom Study app users provide health, lifestyle and demographics information, test results and description of experienced symptoms resulting in a unique source of real time information and retrospective long-term information on experience of COVID19 disease. Both the scale and the richness of the collected information give to this project the potential for very impactful findings at both personalised and population levels.

The successful applicant will make a major contribution to research software that underpins the app and will be involved in all aspects of the open source software that performs data curation and analytics, from design to delivery. They will liaise with application engineers and data scientists from Join Zoe, and with researchers across multiple universities. They will be able to identify issues relating to data schema, scaling, software usability and evolving research needs and be able to prioritise and incrementally deliver the solution that meets those research needs on data at scale.

The successful candidate will hold a PhD in computer science or a related field. They will be able to demonstrate strong experience in a range of skills from design to algorithmic coding, in Python and C/C++. They will ideally be able to demonstrate experience in curating and analysing large datasets. They will also be able to demonstrate experience in working with a broader team and supporting software development with an evolving API.