Senior Research Software Engineer (Web Specialist)

About us

King's e-Research department supports cutting edge computational and data intensive research across all disciplines at the College by providing both infrastructure and expertise within our research community. On the infrastructure side, we provide High Performance Compute, private and public cloud infrastructure and Trusted Research Environments as the core building blocks of modern, data driven research.

Alongside these, e-Research provides expertise in Research Software Engineering, Research Infrastructure Engineering and Data Governance to researchers through direct collaboration, training, one-to-one advice, policy development and community activities.

About the role

King’s e-Research team are again expanding our Research Software Engineering function to support a wide range of projects and activities across the College. This advert is for a specialist in web development who will be working primarily on the PharosAI project (more information below).

The e-Research team is a rapidly growing Department at King’s College London (KCL) which has been created to enable and facilitate computational and data-intensive research across the university.

A core component of e-Research is supporting research through a Research Software Engineering function. Our team of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) elevate the level of computational- and data-science proficiency across campus, by:

1. Contributing directly to software development underpinning research projects,
2. Developing and delivering training on computational- and data-science skills,
3. Providing guidance to PhD students and researchers developing their own code, and
4. Establishing a community of developers of research software across the university

The Research Software Engineering team consists of RSEs with a wide range of different backgrounds and expertise, including both generalists and specialists, to support the full breadth of research across all our faculties. Within the team we also aim to cover a wide range on the “researcher to software engineer spectrum” and are able to offer some flexibility to RSEs in ways of working and a degree of research independence (e.g. seeking grant funding for RSE-driven projects).

KCL is a diverse, research-focused University with an annual research income of around £250 million across nine faculties. We therefore welcome applications from RSEs with a background in any computational or data-intensive discipline. A significant proportion of our research income is for projects within the Health Schools, so experience in a health-related area (e.g. computational biology, bioinformatics, biophysics, medical imaging, clinical data science, etc.) is particularly welcomed, but is not a requirement.

This post will be offered on a full-time (35 hours per week), fixed-term contract until the 31st March 2027,  though we would be open to discussion with candidates looking for part-time roles or job-sharing. All staff within e-Research are entitled to dedicate 10% of their time to a personal development topic of their choice.

Though we are initially offering a fixed-term contract for the duration of the PharosAI project, we do anticipate these posts being extended as part of the continuing growth of the core team, subject to further funding.

The interviews will be one hour long and consist of a short presentation from the candidate, a discussion around some example research code, and questions from the interview panel to allow the candidate to demonstrate their knowledge and skills relevant to the role. In some cases we may need to hold a second round of interviews to decide between multiple strong candidates – in this case we will provide you with notice of the format as soon as we can.

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