Software Engineer

You’ll join a growing, multidisciplinary Digital Engineering team, working side by side with researchers and technical specialists. You’ll build platform-agnostic, cloud-native systems in a hybrid cloud environment and keep them reliable, scalable and robust. You’ll also help connect a wide mix of systems, data sources and datasets so they work together.

It’s a hands-on engineering role. Day to day, you could be working on research cloud infrastructure, data lakes, digital twins or collaborative research platforms.

What you’ll be doing

• Build and run services: Design, build, test, review and deploy software services and data pipelines
• Own it: Take components and project tasks from start to finish
• Work with modern tooling: Containers, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code
• Make it FAIR: Apply Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable principles to your software, data and metadata
• Give back to open source: Handle the licensing, documentation and packaging that make a release genuinely usable
• Co-design with users: Find out what people actually need, show early work and iterate on their feedback
• Translate the technical: Explain choices and trade-offs to non-engineers, in writing and in person
• Shape how the team works: Join in planning, estimation and retrospectives

• A good degree in a relevant subject, or significant hands-on software engineering experience
• Solid experience writing production code in at least one general-purpose language. Python is a bonus because it matches the current stack, but strong engineers from any language are welcome
• Good engineering habits: Git and branching, automated testing, code review, debugging code you didn’t write, and working with SQL and/or NoSQL data stores
• Confidence deploying to Azure, AWS or GCP, working with Docker or similar, and a good grasp of CI/CD
• Strong communication: you can work with non-specialists, write clear documentation, and give and take feedback well
• Curiosity. The stack and the wider landscape keep evolving, and you want to evolve with them

Pay: £40,000.00-£45,000.00 per year

Application question(s):

• Tell us about a piece of software you’ve built or maintained that other people depended on.
• Describe a time you worked with someone who wasn’t a software engineer to work out what they needed, or to explain a technical trade-off to them.
• Tell us about a time you had to get up to speed quickly with an unfamiliar codebase, tool or technology.

Work authorisation:

• United Kingdom (required)