Published 12th December 2025, interviewed September 2024

Can you tell be a bit about your role?

I’m a computational scientist at the moment – I work for the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the University of Reading. So that’s a joint affiliation. I’m based at Reading and NCAS, as we call it for short, is a distributed group. So we have people embedded in different universities across England and now Scotland.

How did you become an RSE?

I started off doing a Master’s in Physics at Durham University. After that, I went to work for the Met Office for two years. I was a Scientific Software Engineer, which is basically a Research Software Engineer. I worked there for two years helping mostly to develop the workflow engine Cylc, which is used a lot in operational weather forecasting and in climate research, for example. After that, I went to NCAS and Reading, and I’ve been here for approaching five years now. My background is in physics (with a particle phenomenology specialism), and then I started as an RSE, and that’s how I got into the climate and weather field, which I continued in because I found it really interesting and worthwhile (and still do!). At NCAS and Reading, I’m part of the Department of Meteorology, and we have a slightly broader and slightly different focus on atmospheric science in the work I do, which is digital atmospheres and building tools for the Earth science domain.

When did you first hear the term “RSE”?

I think it was when I was at the Met Office. My team, who were developing Cylc, applied for an RSE conference and were successful, so a few of us went to give a talk about Cylc. So it was through that conference that I first heard the more general term RSE, as opposed to SSE, which was my job title at the Met Office. This was the one in Birmingham in 2019. It was my first RSECon and I really enjoyed it – I have attended all of them (including the online SeptembRSE virtually) since.

What is your favourite thing about your work and being an RSE?

I particularly like the fact that every day is a bit different, and naturally I get to do a lot of coding which is what drew me to a career in software, but also that I get to interact with various different communities – from different domains within earth science, organisations internationally, plus numerous researchers and other RSEs. There’s a real diversity in what I do, both project-wise and activity-wise, and in who I interact with – that is just brilliant. The coding I do is never the same day to day either. We’re generally working on different issues, adding features, bug fixes, gathering user requirements, doing some user support. So I never get bored in the role as one really big benefit. It’s nice to be able to attend workshops and conferences as well, to meet other scientists and RSEs and communities, plus I get to travel a fair bit for that both nationally and internationally, and I love that aspect.

And what is the least favourite?

That’s a difficult one. But I think it’s probably that I’m not the best at context switching: when you have multiple things to do, and you change over from doing one thing, say you’re coding on something and then you have a meeting. I’m not great at the interface between doing one thing and then doing another thing. And in RSE work, because it is so diverse, often you do switch from doing one task to another and it can be a completely different tool, project and/or stage of software engineering from hour to hour or day to day, say. I feel like the longer I’ve been in my RSE roles, hence the more senior I have got, the more context switching I have to do. And I found ways to get better at that, but it’s still something I struggle with a bit. So I’ve investigated using techniques to facilitate the switch, notably the Pomodoro technique, which is where you dedicate 25 minutes to doing one thing, then take a break, and then move on. But for me, that’s probably the hardest part. 

What’s the most unexpected part about being a RSE?

This is a difficult question. Given my awareness of RSE came from Sheffield where the RSE group grew out of, and is still located within the school (formerly department) of computer science. I’ve become aware that Sheffield RSE is somewhat of an outlier, most are located within their equivalent of IT services or ResearchIT. We do have a partner team in our ResearchIT, “data analytics service”, that was founded after our team. They are essentially a team of RSEs and data scientists with a slightly different funding model, that instead sit on professional services contracts. We often work closely with them, but remain distinct groups despite whatever confusion that may cause.

Do you see yourself as an academic, researcher, software engineer, technician…? All of it? Something else? A mix of one or two terms?

I do see myself more as a software engineer, because day to day I’m mostly doing code-based activities. I do have my name on some papers and do some work that would be aligned with a researcher role in computational science specifically. But despite my job title being Computational Scientist, I don’t feel like I’m a scientist/researcher. I’m definitely a lot more on the software engineering side, which is where I’d prefer to be. But I like that I’m within research, so that I’m interacting with the science community and continuously learning elements of that from the code I do, the projects I am involved with and the people I interact with. From what I’ve picked up, atmospheric science is a very interesting subject.

What do you see as your most likely future career path from here? And what would be your ideal career path?

It’s quite a difficult one, but I really love the weather and climate domain, so I do know I don’t want to move out of that. I want to stay there and learn more and more, because it’s a complex domain. There are a lot of bespoke tools and the big data challenges are particularly intense, in terms of the simulations we do there – in particular there’s the exascale era of performance that we’ve been gearing up for. So I’d like to stay with the weather and climate. But as for what in particular I’ll be working on, I’m not sure. Python is the main language I have coded in, and it would be nice if I could have a chance to work with some other languages such as Julia or something lower-level to expand my experience, but I think there’s plenty of opportunities for that within NCAS and Reading, and potentially towards collaborations too. I do love coding, so part of me doesn’t want to take the route into management, where you’re generally doing more meetings and less software engineering directly – I’m not sure how I’d feel about that because ideally I’d still like to be able to code day to day. I think a lot of people in RSE careers would say the same. I’ve realised I do enjoy speaking with people and thinking about the bigger picture and the architecture and the user requirements, so I can enjoy things that are more planning-based and meeting-based rather than just coding. But I think I’d prefer a role that is more a technical lead than an RSE manager, as an aim.

In your view, how could RSEs be better supported in their work? What do you need? What is missing?

The career path could be better defined and made consistent between institutions and countries, because I think it’s still not recognised as it should be. There are still universities that treat it like a researcher path, but it’s not, of course. We mainly work on a lot more code and data than just actively doing research towards contributing to papers. We certainly help others to do research that results in papers, but often without much credit for it, sadly.

Something I’ve identified in terms of the RSE career that’s a bit tricky is if you are looking to go to a senior role, or at least if you’re looking to progress from junior to mid-level or mid to senior level, it seems that it’s easier to apply to another organisation for a job at the higher level and get it via transferring rather than promotion, which is unfortunate, because often people want to stay in an organisation that they really like and move up that way. So the temptation of, “I could hop and get promoted and get a high level that way” seems definitely not ideal. And I’d love to see a bit more consistency in the career path across institutions and organisations.

What advice do you have to individuals looking to start a career in Research Software Engineering?

If anything, I’d say be open to roles and domains that you may not have considered. When you start out, it is more about developing skills and understanding so keep that in mind too – if you want to be an RSE you don’t have to start out as one, you can work in an area where you work with software, hardware or data or in research and apply to be an RSE if you see a role that fits with your skills and interests. So for example, when I went to my first RSE role (a junior role at the Met Office) I wouldn’t say it was a job I particularly wanted. I applied and got offered it but I wasn’t sure, as it was not something I could foresee a future in, but I just thought “I’ve been offered this job and it sounds potentially quite interesting”. I’m not sure whether I will like it, but I’ll see. And luckily I did that because I realised that I enjoyed the weather and climate domain and being an RSE in itself. I may have fallen into it but I am glad I did because it’s a really exciting career. So I’d say, be open to opportunities that you may not have entertained. Be a bit more flexible, potentially, with what you might try out, particularly when you’re starting out as an RSE or you’re more junior. You might find that something that you didn’t think was for you could actually be a really exciting and enjoyable career, or take you on a path that ultimately leads that way.