About the role

The Institute’s Research Engineering Group work towards maximising impact in data science research projects by realising cutting edge research as professionally usable software tools, so they can be used to address real-world challenges.

The Group’s staff are research software engineers, research data scientists and research computing engineers. We note the considerable overlap between these emerging roles and embrace the breadth of interdisciplinary skills and diversity of approaches entailed in these fields. Staff can choose any of these job titles and change their choice as their career progresses.

The Group is central to the institute’s research landscape and will continue to play an important role in enabling our research ambitions. To support this, we are recruiting Research Data Scientists and Research Software Engineers to join our team at an exciting time.

Role purpose

In contrast to traditional research careers, we are committed expert collaborators, who join research teams to further the Institute’s challenges. We collaborate with scholars across the Institute’s research community to enhance the applicability of research for particular problems. We work with clients in industry, government and the third sector to turn their data challenges into research questions. We value expertise across many domains, with current members of the Group having backgrounds in psychology, mathematics, digital humanities, research computing and other areas. We rely on this diversity to design tools, practices and systems to harness the power of data science around the world.

We create software that implements research and use it to analyse client data in a readable, reliable and reproducible fashion. We present conclusions of research and analysis to the research community and clients through presentations, research papers, blog posts, interactive data visualisations and open-source software packages. We develop and work with state-of-the-art, high performance computing and cloud infrastructure to realise collaborators’ data science and artificial intelligence research at scale.

How you will make an impact

• Apply state-of-the-art and novel data science and artificial intelligence techniques emerging from the Institute and elsewhere to problems faced by the Turing’s clients.
• Collaborate with research colleagues to develop and maintain high-quality, well-tested software embodying research outputs.
• Present, disseminate and explain our work via presentations, reports and well-documented software packages.
• Contribute to the life of the Institute and support its community:
  • Deliver teaching and training to colleagues and students, including within the team in our regular skills sessions.
  • Support research colleagues to make the most of the Institute’s secure high performance computing environments for advanced research.

About you

• Relevant industry or academic experience (for instance pursuing a PhD) in a field with significant use of both computer programming and advanced statistical or numerical methods.
• Fluency in one or more modern programming languages used in research in data science and artificial intelligence. (We particularly work in R, Python, and modern C++, but demonstrable use of other programming languages for research, together with a facility for learning new languages, is most welcome.)
• An understanding of the importance of good practices for producing reliable software and reproducible analyses, such as version control, issue tracking, automated testing, package management and literate analysis tools such as Jupyter and Rmarkdown.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience in the authoring of technical reports or research papers, and giving presentations or leading classes.
• Experience managing, structuring, analysing and visualising research data and the results of computational experiments.
• Ability to lead one’s own work independently, including planning and execution, and to collaborate productively as part of a team.
• Demonstrated enthusiasm and ability to rapidly assimilate new computational and mathematical ideas and techniques on the job and apply them successfully.

Please see the Job Description for a full breakdown of the role, person specification and application procedure.