Scientific Software Engineer in Didcot

Salary: £56,509 to £62,159 per annum (dependent on skills and experience)

Hours: Full time or Part-time (minimum 30 hours per week)

Contract Type: Fixed Term to 31st March 2027

Location: Science and Technology Facilities Council, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell, Oxfordshire OX11 0DE

Come and do the kind of work that got you into technology in the first place. Work with cutting-edge tech and world-leading scientists and engineers. Harness the power of some of the country's most advanced supercomputers to tackle work that improves daily life in the UK and far beyond.

STFC's Central Laser Facility (CLF) provides advanced laser research facilities for UK and international scientists. The CLF has been awarded £17M funding for a transformation of their ultrafast laser spectroscopy facilities, Artemis and Ultra, (the HiLUX project). This four-year project will extend the range of techniques for ultrafast laser spectroscopy, and encompasses upgrades to laboratories, new laser systems, new detectors and sample-handling technologies, control systems and data handling.

HiLUX will be the only open-access facility in the world providing access to such a wide range of spectroscopies. The aim is that the combination of scientific information we obtain will enable us to study more complex systems than has previously been possible, with relevance to a wide range of societally, environmentally and industrially important areas. These include biomolecular dynamics, biomedical analysis, energy storage, catalysis and photovoltaics. Our user community will be from both academia and industry.

About the role

The HiLUX project will provide higher quality spectroscopic data at higher data rates, and we aim to transform the methods available to our users for both data collection and data analysis. We are seeking to recruit a scientific software engineer to develop the software to maximise scientific exploitation of our data.

You will develop data acquisition and data analysis software for a variety of ultrafast laser spectroscopy experiments, including:

• Providing data analysis software for photoemission spectroscopy, to enable on-the-fly analysis of spectra.
• Adapting commercial data acquisition software for photoemission spectroscopy with a momentum microscope and hemispherical analyser to work with laser-based experiments.
• Building on existing data acquisition and analysis interfaces for spectroscopy techniques including time-resolved infrared, visible and Raman, multidimensional and sum-frequency generation (SFG).
• Applying relevant and new approaches to data analysis such as global analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), lifetime density analysis and machine learning.

You will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team, including physicists, chemists, materials scientists and engineers. You will interface directly with scientists to gather requirements and collaborate closely with our software engineering group. Our controls software team are providing a control system based on EPICS and we plan to use Apache Kafka for data transport.

You will also interact with STFC's scientific computing department, who provide data archiving and cloud-based virtual machines that host our data analysis packages, and with colleagues at other international facilities to develop shared approaches. The data acquisition and analysis packages that you create will be used by many research groups across a wide range of scientific applications.

Person Specification

The below essential criteria will be assessed at Shortlisting (S), Interview (I) or both (S&I):

• Degree in a STEM subject, and a demonstrable track record of scientific software development, including data acquisition and/or data analysis. (S&I)
• Experience developing well-designed, robust software in Python and its scientific packages (such as numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas). (S&I)
• Understanding of modern software development practices (e.g. testing, version control, continuous integration, Agile, object-oriented design). (S&I)
• Experience of leading software projects through the full life cycle, from gathering requirements to deployment and maintenance. (S&I)
• Track record in designing technical solutions independently and building completed software products. (S&I)
• Good communication skills and ability to work effectively as part of a team. (I)

STFC values their employees by offering a benefits package designed to provide an excellent work/life balance including 30 days annual leave, 10.5 public and privilege holidays, flexible working hours, exceptional average salary pension scheme, social and sporting activities and societies and a subsidised restaurant.

Please note, if you will require sponsorship to work in the UK, as part of your sponsorship application, you and any dependants travelling with you, will be required to pay costs directly to The Home Office for the application before you start your role with us. UKRI is normally able to reimburse some, or all of these fees after you have become an employee and this can be discussed with the Hiring Manager.