Who is Castor?
Castor is one of the fastest growing healthtech startups. Our mission is to bring medical research into the digital age. Why? Because medical research is still largely run using free-text, paper and spreadsheets.
By enabling our users to capture high quality data and making it machine readable, we are fundamentally changing the broken evidence based medicine process. You’ve found yourself a company with a true purpose. Learn more at castoredc.com and on our Life at Castor instagram channel.
How is Castor supporting the Coronavirus crisis?
Castor has joined the global fight against the Coronavirus by making our research data capture system available for free for all COVID-19 research projects. As of May 15th, Castor is supporting more than 200 COVID-19 studies across the world.
The opportunity: lead Castor’s MyConsent team
Patients play a pivotal role in medical research, spending time and energy to contribute to the advancement of science. We started MyConsent as a privacy-preserving electronic (re-)consent application to stimulate data re-use.
With the coronavirus crisis affecting projects worldwide, we realized that digital interaction with research participants is a key ingredient for the continuity of medical research in a post-COVID era. For this reason, we are expanding into a fully-fledged eConsent and patient engagement platform, while maintaining our vision to provide a secure and privacy-preserving experience.
As the tech lead for MyConsent, you’ll be responsible for the day-to-day engineering operations of the team. You’ll be the technical voice towards other stakeholders, working closely with the Product Owner to plan and execute the technical roadmap.
What you’ll do
At Castor our stack, well...it's stacked! With PHP at it's heart, MyConsent uses Laravel, Vue.js and PostgreSQL. We run on Kubernetes (AKS), build via CircleCI and monitor with Tideways and Prometheus. To realise our vision and ensure our products and tools embrace the frontier of innovation, you’ll be:
- Be the key point of contact for other stakeholders across Engineering and Product
- Designing, debugging and coding for a growing network of medical researchers
- Analysing performance data and optimising bottlenecks
- Deconstructing user requirements to model optimal, scalable, solutions
- Working on automated toolchains to construct and integrate our applications
- Collaborating with and mentoring engineers, championing their technical growth
What you’ll bring
As a senior software engineer and Team Lead, you’ll bring broad and detailed technical depth, understanding how to decrypt and improve a codebase whilst keeping yourself ahead with current trends. You’ll also bring:
- Experience in scaling up cloud-based applications
- Extensive practical experience with PHP, design patterns, OOP, and automated tests
- Practical working experience and understanding of symmetric- and asymmetric cryptography
- Strong leadership and communication skills from coaching teams towards optimal performance
- A coding consortium of knowledge, being able to build new, globally scaling features
- A positive approach to mentoring and supporting others in their development
What you’ll learn
It’s a crucial time for Castor. We’re on ‘full power mode’ and scaling-up at an exponential rate. For you, the opportunities are endless:
How to build robust ‘bulletproof’ security which protects patients medical data Working with a diverse group of PHP practitioners from all over the world To share your ideas openly and influence the growth of a true scale-up company Be involved in maximising the impact of medical research and improving healthcare
How do we say thank you?
At Castor we truly live and breathe our core value, believing we can 'achieve anything with a healthy and happy team.' With this in mind, we offer the following benefits:
- Awesome new office near Amsterdam Amstelstation - the Castor Burrow!
- Want to spend less time in work? We offer contracts between 32 - 40 hours per week
- A competitive salary plus a guaranteed happy holidays bonus
- An advantageous allocation in our Employee Stock Option Plan
- 30 days annual leave (plus national holidays)
- Interested in ‘lifelong learning’? You’ll love using our development and training budget
- We love good food! So, we provide lunch and healthy snacks in the office every day
- Flexible approach to working - nobody is tracking your time except you.
- A new MacBook or Dell laptop, we’re a tech start-up after all ;)
- Like to feel zen? You’ll love our daily meditation, in our very own office ‘relax room’
- How do we care about your wellbeing outside of work? A company subscription to Calm
- Grow together as a team during our annual company retreat
Our team consists of PhDs and healthcare IT enthusiasts who are eager to contribute to the improvement of medical research. We have a diverse team, employing Dutch, American, Canadian, German, Swedish, British, Philippine and Romanian and Indian staff. We briefly introduce everyone on our team page.
We are developing Castor EDC (Electronic Data Capture), a web application that allows medical researchers to collect data for their clinical studies. We are one of the fastest growing HealthTech companies, having tripled our customer base in the last year. We are proud of the fact that our customers are our biggest growth engine. Once they use our product, they fall in love and tell their fellow researchers.
We want to accelerate medical research by unlocking the potential of every researcher. Starting with an easy to use and affordable EDC we want to help researchers throughout the entire medical research process. We believe that standardizing and reusing research datasets is key to meeting tomorrow’s healthcare challenges.