Scientific Software Engineer

Salary: £51,500 - £56,650 per annum (dependent on skills and experience)

Contract Type: Fixed Term (2 years)

Hours: Full time

Location: Science and Technology Facilities Council, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell, Oxfordshire

Come and discover the kind of impact you can make when you work with some of the best facilities and brightest scientists in the world.

The Central Laser Facility (CLF), part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), provides advanced laser research facilities for UK and international scientists.

Within CLF, Octopus is a UK national facility with a suite of sophisticated laser-based imaging and laser trapping capabilities, such as super-resolution microscopy (including, SIM, STED, MINFLUX, AiryScan, and STORM at both room and cryogenic temperatures), multidimensional single molecule imaging and tracking, confocal microscopy, light microscopy, and focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy for life, environmental, and materials sciences. These microscope techniques are developed and operated collaboratively by a team of physicists, life scientists, and computational scientists. 

The current focus in Octopus is cryo-correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) and we are recruiting scientists and scientific software engineers to lead new physics techniques to push structural biology to study proteins in their cellular context.

About the Role

Recent advances in microscopy at CLF Octopus have led to an explosion in the quantity and complexity of data being generated. We have a great opportunity for a skilled scientific software engineer to take the next step in their career and acquire new skills by contributing to the development, deployment and optimisation of scientific imaging workflows at the CLF's Octopus Microscopy facility.

You will develop software tools to automate the data management and data processing of the CLEM pipeline.

Working as a part of the interdisciplinary Octopus facility research team, you will contribute to a growing cross-department and inter-department scientific computing effort focussed on enabling and delivering world-class science for users of our facilities.

The successful candidate is guaranteed a stimulating work environment with the opportunity to solve cutting-edge scientific problems with immediate real-world impact.

About You

You will have completed a PhD or have equivalent professional experience in a computational or relevant science discipline and a demonstrable track record of scientific software development, including experience of numerical algorithm development and application.

You will be motivated by the opportunity to apply your excellent research software engineering and scientific computing skills to existing CLF Octopus workflows (predominantly Python and C++) and to the development of new workflows across the range of techniques offered by Octopus.

You will also have the ability to solve complex, interdisciplinary problems either through applying existing methods and techniques or developing new ones.

What we offer

We are offering a fixed term position with a whole host of benefits including:

• 30 days holiday annually (in addition to 10.5 bank holidays and privilege days)
• flexible working hours
• an excellent defined average salary pension scheme
• employee shopping/travel discounts
• excellent learning and development opportunities
• visa Sponsorship for candidates applying outside of the UK

Plus many more benefits and wellbeing initiatives that enable our employees to have a great work life balance!

We ask some of the biggest questions in the universe, to answer some of the biggest challenges in the world. Together, our scientists, technologists, engineers and business support team explore the unknown across every field you could think of. And they turn what they find into work that changes the world around us.

What could you achieve with the world-leading facilities and experts of one of Europe's largest research organisations by your side? Join us and discover what's possible.

UKRI is an Equal Opportunity & Disability Confident Employer.

Closing date 29^th October 2023