Purpose of the post
HDR UK requires the services of an experienced Senior Full Stack Research Software Engineer to work within its technology team. You will work across a range of HDR UK technical solutions including the Health Data Research Gateway, the Disease Atlas, Researcher Registry, Phenotype Library, Cohort Discovery and future technology services.
This role may suit someone with an academic research software engineering background who would like to bring their domain knowledge to the Gateway and Technology Ecosystem.
You will be part of a multidisciplinary team that develops an over-arching interoperable infrastructure to ensure that UK health data assets are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reuseable (FAIR) and accessible for research, innovation and clinical trials. The successful candidate will be expected to work within an Agile software development team, providing development of infrastructure and services to deliver scientific insights, that improve health and healthcare of the UK and worldwide populations.
The successful candidate will be expected to provide individual contribution as a full stack hands-on developer, work within the Gateway and wider Technology Ecosystem development teams, carry out code review & quality checks and document as required. Ideally the post will also bring their health data domain knowledge to the teams and have a desire to publish academic papers.
As a senior full stack research software engineer (RSE), the successful candidate will act across the four pillars of research software engineering: software development, training, community and policy. The post will leverage existing health data domain knowledge to gain a deep understanding of the current and future needs of the Gateway and the wider Technology Ecosystem. Together with others in HDR UK community, the post will help identify and prototype new ways in which it can be extended and improved. The scope and breadth of research that is made possible by health data is rapidly expanding, as are the technologies employed for their analysis. Accordingly, the Technology Ecosystem must adapt, develop, and anticipate demands of future health data researchers, and research software engineering plays a critical role in developing awareness and building capacity to realise this. The post will help both by developing RSE policies and practices within the HDR UK community and strengthening networks between HDR UK and relevant researcher/practitioner communities across the life sciences, informatics, and beyond.
Main Responsibilities
- Software Development:
- Full stack developer
- Developing all different aspects of the Gateway and Technology Ecosystem including Search, Content Management, APIs, Visualisations and Integrations
- Working to an agile methodology
- Documenting code, conducting code reviews for the team and maintaining high quality, performant and testable code
- Troubleshooting and supporting development issues as they arise working with the team
- Drafting publications describing the solutions developed
- RSE Training and Capacity building
- Working with software engineers and solutions architects to learn about, engage with, and translate computational research from relevant domains
- Maintain and share awareness of current practices in open science, reproducibility and scholarly communication of computational research
- Support continued professional development of software engineers wishing to engage with RSE practices.
- Engage with national and international bodies to identify opportunities for collaboration and support to upskill the HDR UK community
- RSE Policy and standards development
- Engage with national and international bodies to align HDR UK’s activities with nationally and internationally recognised standards for secure, open, transparent, and reproducible computational research resources and infrastructure.
- Collaborate with policy development teams to maintain good practice for RSEs working and undergoing continued professional development in HDR UK.
- RSE Community and Engagement
- Communicate HDR UK’s RSE activities at relevant conferences and workshops
- Identify and initiate new activities to sustain and diversify the HDR UK RSE community
Knowledge, skills and experience
- Experience working in an agile / scrum software development team
- Comfortable operating across national teams and different strategic initiatives (i.e. science and technology)
- Experience using Confluence, JIRA, Trello or similar Agile project management tools
- Proficient in English
- 5+ years software development experience, including languages: ReactJS/NextJS, PHP, and Python
- Great attention to detail
- Demonstrable experience using Git (preferably GitHub)
- Have worked with software development best practice (e.g. testing, continuous integration, documentation, release management)
- Have been through all software development life cycle stages (requirements, prioritisation, specification, design, code and test).
- Delivered code in an iterative project management-based context.
- Worked as part of a team of engineers (four or more concurrently) working on a codebase.
- Project Management skills
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
- Excellent time management and organisational skills
- Ability to work independently and as part of a team
- Ability to liaise confidently and effectively with a range of individuals
- Willingness to learn and develop
- A good BSc. (2:1 or better) in Computer Science or other related subject with a strong computational component or equivalent experience
- Experience of RSE practices critical for open reproducible research (e.g. publishing code, workflows and datasets with maximal reproducibility)
- Experience presenting research at technical and non-technical workshops and conferences
- Ability to research, adapt to and adopt new technologies and approaches
- Experience in ongoing mentoring and professional development of research software engineers
- Interest in engaging with research challenges relevant to Health Data
Please note, as we are a UK-based organisation, applicants must be living in, and eligible to work in, the UK. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.
We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.
We politely request no contact from recruitment agencies or media sales. We do not accept speculative CVs from recruitment agencies nor accept the fees associated with them.
