Research Software Engineer Assistant

Fixed Term - Full Time

Contract Duration: 2.5 years through a development plan towards a substantive grade 7 position, a case for which will be made at the appropriate time, subject to funding

Contracted Hours per Week: 35

Closing Date: : 12-Oct-2025, 11:59:00 PM

Disclosure and Barring Service Requirement: Not Applicable.

The Role and the Department       

The Directorate of Advanced Research Computing (ARC) provides a broad computational capability to underpin and help define the nature of research and innovation that can be undertaken with the institution. 

ARC’s mission is to deliver a coherent strategy for the computational support of research: enabling research and innovation to be at the forefront of computational practice; enabling academic leadership through the adoption and evolution of leading technology; fostering associated expertise; and enhancing interdisciplinary collaborations. Leading-edge platforms including High Performance Computing, computational and cutting-edge data analytics methods, and growth and retention of vital capacity in research software engineering and technical R&D are at the core of this endeavour.

We organise our activity under three main pillars:       

1. Research Computing Platforms     
2. Research Software Engineering     
3. Developing researcher computational skills

Which is delivered by the Administration, Research Computing Platforms (RCP) and Research Software Engineering (RSE) teams. 

Through collaboration between the Institute for Data Science, Department of Computer Science and ARC, several grants have been secured under the umbrella of the UK’s of  Digital Research Technology Professionals (dRTP) programme. These projects aim to create an upskilling and code porting landscape – predominantly for simulations and AI running on HPC machinery – for the whole UK DRI community. Their mission includes creating material for the RTP upskilling, running upskilling events, establishing a national performance assessment service, conducting performance assessments and benchmarking case studies, and helping codes to transition into the era of accelerate compute. 

You will be embedded into the SHAREing (https://shareing-dri.github.io) project team, working closely with the PI and other project members, the platforms team within ARC and realise synergies with related activity within Durham and Nationally. We expect the successful candidate to develop specialist knowledge and expertise across several advanced computing technologies core to the deliverables that are part of the grant and services delivered by ARC longer-term, including the following technologies:

• Compiled languages (e.g. C/Fortran)
• Shared and distributed memory programming tools (e.g. OpenMP, MPI)
• Accelerator programming (e.g. CUDA, OpenCL, SYCL)
• Machine Learning libraries such as Tensorflow or PyTorch
• Serial and parallel debugging and profiling
• Parallel numerical algorithms and libraries
• System software stack administration and novel/experimental hardware.

Over the course of the appointment, the candidate will be supported through a development plan towards a substantive grade 7 position, a case for which will be made at the appropriate time, subject to funding.

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