AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca — Senior AWS DevOps Engineer (Contract)

AstraZeneca — Senior AWS DevOps Engineer (Contract)

About the company

AstraZenecaAstraZeneca is a global pharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development, and commercialisation of prescription medicines in oncology, cardiovascular, respiratory, and other therapeutic areas. The company invests heavily in R&D and bioinformatics to advance drug discovery and clinical research.

I served as a Senior AWS DevOps Engineer on contract at AstraZeneca. My main focus was deploying a Django application in the Beijing AWS region to enable DNA sequencing for the bioinformatics R&D oncology department in China. The work involved Python web development, Jenkins pipelines, Infrastructure as Code on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and building a custom AWS Data Lake for research data.

Role Location Period
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer Cambridge, England, United Kingdom Aug 2022 – Dec 2022

What I did

  • Django & deployment — Developed Python web applications with Django and implemented Jenkins pipelines for deployment.
  • Infrastructure as code — Used CloudFormation and Ansible for IaC on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
  • Containers & compute — Used Docker and EC2 for containerisation and server management.
  • Bioinformatics tools — Installed and configured 24+ tools including BLAT, BLAST, HOMER, and SAMTools on the Red Hat Linux environment.
  • Data Lake — Built a custom AWS Data Lake with PostgreSQL (RDS), Lambda, S3, and Step Functions for storage, processing, and orchestration.
  • Security & governance — Applied AWS IAM and best practices for secure access and compliance.
  • People & process — Mentored junior staff in China and produced documentation; followed Agile and Scrum methodologies.

Contributing to the bioinformatics R&D oncology team in China by deploying and operating a secure, scalable Django-based platform and data lake in the Beijing AWS region.

Technologies

Category Technologies
Application Django, Python, Jenkins
IaC & config CloudFormation, Ansible, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Compute & containers Docker, EC2
Data PostgreSQL (RDS), Lambda, S3, Step Functions
Tools BLAT, BLAST, HOMER, SAMTools, BCFTools

References

    Posts

    References

      Posts