Research Software Engineer

About us

We are seeking to recruit a two-year full-time Research Software Engineer (RSE) within the Department of Earth Sciences, Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at University College London (UCL). The RSE will join Palaeoverse through the Software Sustainability Institute funded project ‘Converting Users to Contributors: Enabling Sustainable Maintenance and Development of Palaeoverse’.

Palaeoverse (https://palaeoverse.org/) is an organisation aiming to unite the palaeontological community through shared resources, agreed standards, and a collective commitment to improving reproducibility in palaeontological research. The organisation began in 2022 when a group of early-career researchers recognised a common challenge: many of us were independently developing similar workflows for cleaning and preparing palaeontological data due to a lack of standardised tools and protocols, leading to duplicated work that was difficult to reproduce. In response, we came together to develop the palaeoverse R package—a toolkit designed to streamline data preparation and exploration in palaeontological research.

About the role

Employment is project time bound and will commence on the 1st of March 2026, for a duration of 24 months, concluding on the 28th of February 2028. The duration of this position may be extended if additional funding becomes available (e.g. sought through competitive-funding schemes). The RSE will be based in the Department of Earth Sciences at UCL throughout the duration of the project but will be required to travel both nationally and internationally to carry out project-specific activities.

The main responsibility of the RSE will be to improve the long-term sustainability of Palaeoverse software toolkits by auditing and updating existing software packages to improve internal structure, code readability, and maintainability. They will also contribute to developing comprehensive contributor guidelines, documentation, and frameworks. In addition to this, the successful candidate will have the opportunity to get involved in research applications of the software toolkits. These will be carried out with an international team of project partners.

The post is funded by a grant that covers travel to national and international conferences which the successful applicant would be expected to attend and present at. As part of the role, the RSE will be responsible for leading training workshops on research software development and maintenance at dedicated events and alongside community events.

About you

The successful candidate will have a university degree (BSc, MSc, or PhD) in a related field (e.g. earth sciences, biological sciences, computer sciences), and a demonstrated ability or experience programming for Research and Development in an academic or industrial setting.

Significant experience writing functional R software, knowledge of and commitment to software development best practice including issue tracking, testing, documentation, version control, and continuous integration, and familiarity with GitHub and GitHub Actions is essential.

The ability to rapidly acquire fluent knowledge of new programming languages and platforms, and the ability to communicate with researchers at a professional level to ensure their research vision and/or research questions are supported is also essential.

What we offer

As well as the exciting opportunities this role presents, we also offer some great benefits some of which are below:

• 41 Days holiday (27 days annual leave 8 bank holiday and 6 closure days)
• Additional 5 days’ annual leave purchase scheme
• Defined benefit career average revalued earnings pension scheme (CARE)
• Cycle to work scheme and season ticket loan
• Immigration loan
• Relocation scheme for certain posts
• On-Site nursery
• On-site gym

Visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/reward-and-benefits to find out more.

Customer advert reference: B04-06999

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