Job description

 e-Research is a new Department at King’s College London (KCL) which is being created to help  enable and  facilitate computational- and data-intensive research across the university.  

A core component of e-Research will be supporting research through a  Research Software Engineering capability. A team of Research Software Engineers ( RSEs) is being recruited to help elevate the level of computational- and data-science proficiency across campus. The RSE team will work to achieve this by: 

1. contributing directly to code development underpinning research projects, 
2. providing guidance and recommendations to PhD students and Post-docs developing their own code, and 
3. delivering training and short courses on computational- and data-science methods 

The RSE team will consist of software engineers with a range of different academic backgrounds and expertise. KCL e-Research is now recruiting for a Research Software Engineer with a background in bioinformatics and computational biology. 

The RSE in bioinformatics should be an experienced data scientist, with an academic background in biology and a practical knowledge of managing complex biological datasets. 

This post represents a great opportunity to be one of the first recruits into the new Research Software Engineering team, with significant investment planned over the next 3 years. KCL is at the start of a significant reboot of its e-Research function having invested £2,500,000+ over the past 18 months on core platforms for providing Cloud, Storage and HPC capabilities to its world-leading researchers. The Research Software Engineer will play a key role within e-Research, helping to establish this new capability across campus. 

KCL is a diverse, research-focussed University with an annual research income of around £200 million. A significant proportion of this income is for research projects within the Health Schools, many of which could benefit from the skills and experience of a Research Software Engineer with a strong background in computational biology, bioinformatics or biophysics. 

This post will be offered on a full-time, indefinite contract.

Key responsibilities

Contributing directly to development projects

• The Research Software Engineer (RSE) will contribute directly to development/programming research projects, by utilising their coding experience and skills to develop new code bases, or extend, improve or optimising existing bioinformatics/computational biology code. 
• In this responsibility, the RSE will contribute hands-on research software code development as part of a wider group of engineers, or independently (working with the research Primary Investigator (PI)). 
• The RSE will have a proportion of their time costed into specific research grants for a defined period of time. This time will then be allocated to a specific development project for that grant, upon successful funding of the grant. 
• The RSE will be responsible for understanding the work area/project in which their time is allocated, by engaging with the PI or carrying-out independent background reading or research. 

Developing pre-project requirements

• The RSE will contribute requirements-gathering capabilities to research primary investigators (PIs), to help scope the work required for the development project. 
• The Research Software Engineer will be responsible for identifying the time contribution required, as well ultimately the project costings, which are to be included in the research proposal submission. 
• The RSE may be required to directly contribute text and project plans to research grant proposals, in support of the PI. 
• With the Research Software Engineering team, the RSE will be responsible for managing and prioritising their time, especially the direct allocation of their time to funded research projects. 
• The RSE will be responsible for establishing relationships with the bioinformatics and computational biology groups across KCL, and communicating their role and skills to potential adopters of the research software engineering capability. 

Providing consultation and guidance to PhD students and Post-docs

• In addition to being directly allocated to specific research projects, the Research Software Engineer will be responsible for providing support and guidance to PhD students and post-docs who use bioinformatics applications and pipelines in their research. 
• The RSE will primarily provide this guidance by replying to helpdesk tickets, and replying to User Forum postings.  
• The primary role in supporting KCL bioinformatics PhD and post-docs will be offering recommendations to improve code, helping to identify bugs and errors, and advocating best-practices in code development. 

Delivering training and short-courses

• The RSE will be responsible for occasionally delivering training and short courses to PhD students and post-docs in the KCL bioinformatics and computational biology community, in the fundamentals of scientific computing, HPC and code development best practices. 
• The Research Software Engineer will work with groups across campus to align teaching courses with existing offerings. 

Supporting e-Research bioinformatics platforms

• The Research Software Engineer will be responsible for helping to support the bioinformatics/computational biology platforms used by the research community.  
• The RSE will work with the e-Research infrastructure and support team to help install, validate and benchmark bioinformatics software applications on the e-Research HPC platform. 
• The RSE will also be responsible (with the wider e-Research team) for helping to install servers providing bioinformatics capabilities on the e-Research research cloud CREATE.

The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post.  

Skills knowledge and experience

Essential criteria  

Candidates must provide clear evidence of the following essential qualifications, experience and knowledge, for their application to be considered: 

1. Degree in Computer Science, Biological Sciences, Computational Biology or Bioinformatics or a Postgraduate qualification (e.g., MSc, PhD) in Computational Biology, Biophysics or Bioinformatics

2.       The RSE must have demonstrable skills in software development in scientific or numerical computing (e.g., a public git repository with evidence of their programming proficiency) in bioinformatics, computational biology or biophysics 

3.       The RSE must be proficient in programming in scientific Python and at least one other language for scientific or numerical computing (such as C/C++, R, Julia, etc.) 

4.       The RSE must have experience as a data scientist or software engineer, including leading the development of projects (and including relevant post-doc posts, or equivalent). 

5.       The Research Software Engineer should have significant demonstrable experience running analyses and pipelines in a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment (a multi-user environment using linux command line, queue scheduler for sharing resources, and a high-performance network and filesystem).

6.       The RSE should have demonstrable expertise in big-data and data-science methods with biological data sets.

7.       The Research Software Engineer should have demonstrable experience of multiple-developer collaborative software development projects.

8.       The RSE should have a strong capability in the computational- and data-science skills required of a bioinformatician/computational biologist, such as linux, networking, filesystems, data management, HPC, git, etc.

Desirable criteria

Candidates are required to provide evidence of the following desirable skills, experience and knowledge in their application: 

1.      The RSE should have PhD-level knowledge of an academic research domain such as bioinformatics, computational biology or biophysics - they should have published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

2.      The RSE should have a good understanding of the UK academic research sector, including the policies of the grant-awarding bodies, and the expectations of the major funders towards research software engineering. 

3.      The RSE should ideally have some experience developing materials for teaching and training courses in computational- and data-science programming methods and best practices to PhD student and Post-docs (or developers of equivalent capability) 

4.      The RSE should have demonstrable skills in software development in scientific computing - in particular in bioinformatics, supporting NGS pipelines and analysis, and experienced with a range of different data types.

5.      The RSE should have a demonstrable understanding of Nextflow for managing bioinformatics workflows

6.      The RSE should have a good knowledge of popular bioinformatics packages such as Bioconductor.

7.      The RSE should have recent experience developing materials for teaching and training courses in basic computational- and data-science methods, and best practices to PhD student and Post-docs (or equivalent).

Interviews will be held on the KCL campus in central London at a date to be specified. The interview will consist of a presentation from the candidates demonstrating their relevant experience for the role, as well as questions and potentially tasks for the candidate to demonstrate their appropriate knowledge and skills for the role.

This post is subject to a Disclosure and Barring Service Clearence.