Delivery
Taking substantial technical programmes from sales proposal through to production, including Innovate UK projects, formal reporting and ISO-compliant quality and security processes.
Curriculum vitae
Matt Oates
Innovation · Data · Computational Biology
I have years of experience building scientific software, data platforms and teams across biotechnology, healthcare and academia. I currently work as a Staff Engineer at Biorelate, combining data engineering, cloud architecture and agentic retrieval systems for life-science research. My background spans production software delivery, computational biology, regulated clinical systems and large-scale scientific data.
Skills
ProgrammingPython, Perl, JavaScript, C, Java, PHP, R, Rust, shell
DataPostgreSQL, MySQL, Spanner, BigQuery, Cassandra, DBT, Parquet
PlatformsAWS, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, EKS, Docker, Pulumi
EngineeringDagster, Prefect, Dataflow, Apache Beam, CI/CD, testing
LeadershipTechnical strategy, team building, delivery, hiring, Communities of Practice
ScienceBioinformatics, genomics, clinical data, ontologies, scientific visualisation
What I Bring
People & Leadership
Building teams and organisations through growth, with people-first line management, thoughtful hiring, professional development and Communities of Practice.
Innovation
Turning scientific ideas into useful systems—from rapid genomic diagnostics and clinical data products to new data platforms and grounded life-science AI.
Communication
Comfortable with investors, clients, international conferences and public engagement, translating complex technical work for audiences at every level.
Work and Education History
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Staff Engineer @ Biorelate Ltd.
Jan 2026 – Present
Leading application engineering around Biorelate's life-science data platform. Oversaw migration of the core application from OpenSearch, Neo4j and PostgreSQL to Google Cloud Spanner, and led development of a grounded co-scientist chat experience using graph and text-search RAG.
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Lead Data Engineer @ Biorelate Ltd.
Oct 2023 – Jan 2026
Formed and grew the Data Engineering function, established provenance and observability standards, and unified several ingest services into Python ETL orchestrated by Dagster. Delivered multi-terabyte quarterly data products, migrated customer deliveries to Parquet, and developed warehouse and lake architecture across PostgreSQL, BigQuery and Spanner.
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Independent Contractor @ Descrybe
Jan 2023 – Oct 2023
Delivered data-science and biotechnology projects including Python engineering, AWS infrastructure with Pulumi, UK Biobank clinical-data preparation, disease ontology modelling and scientific investigation of phenotype–genotype relationships.
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Chief Data Officer @ Unai Ltd.
Feb 2021 – Jan 2023
Defined company data strategy and led Data Science, Data Engineering and BI. Established governance, privacy and professional-development practices, developed NHS pathology business, and managed delivery of Crosswalk, a health-data harmonisation service for clinical codings and ontologies.
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Senior Data Scientist @ Unai Ltd.
Jul 2019 – Jan 2021
Delivered consulting and pre-sales analysis in regulated health environments, including statistical genomics services, theatre ticket-sales modelling and technical business-development support.
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Director of Science and Data Analytics @ Genetrainer Ltd.
Jul 2017 – Present
Research, product and infrastructure work combining consumer genetics with sports technology, including grant development, genetic training-load models and migration from Google Cloud Datastore to AWS and PostgreSQL.
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Principal Scientist / Senior Software Developer @ Congenica Ltd.
Feb 2015 – Jun 2017
Led protein science and an InnovateUK multi-omics project for Congenica's clinical genomics platform. Served as acting IT Director during ISO 27001/13485 certification and implementation for operation within the NHS N3 network.
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Research and Software Roles
Jul 2005 – Feb 2015
- Post-doctoral Researcher and SUPERFAMILY Developer, University of Bristol
- Research Assistant, Centre for Catchment & Coastal Research
- Programmer, Plymouth Marine Laboratory Remote Sensing Group
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PhD — Computational Biology
Jan 2010 – Sep 2014 Faculty of Engineering Commendation University of Bristol
Research on protein disorder, domain evolution and cell-signalling systems. Led the international collaboration that created D2P2, the Database of Disordered Protein Predictions.
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MRes Complexity Sciences / BSc Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence
2003 – 2010 MRes Merit; BSc First Class
University of Bristol and University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Community & Working Style
Teaching and mentoring
I mentor children at Bristol Library Services’ weekly Code Club and coach people moving into software engineering through Codebar Bristol.
Earlier outreach includes STEM Ambassador workshops, Raspberry Pi family boot camps, the Bristol Festival of Nature and university computing support.
Publications
Citation counts are a June 2026 snapshot and may differ between scholarly indexes.