Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility. Located at Harwell Science & Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire, we enable world-leading research across a wide range of scientific disciplines and industrial applications.

We are looking for a high calibre software engineer to join our dynamic scientific software team. The team have the responsibility for the provision of advanced data evaluation, analysis and visualization software applications for both internal and external users of Diamond. These applications often exploit the very latest techniques to address the challenging requirements of a broad range of scientific disciplines including macromolecular crystallography through to nanostructures and materials science.

You will operate within the scientific software  team of experienced software scientists and engineers and will work with our beamline scientists to identify and define requirements for data analysis and visualization applications and then ensure that they are implemented in a timely and effective way. It is important also to work with our data acquisition team to help optimize the whole scientific process at a Diamond beamline from data acquisition through to the experimenters leaving with high quality experimental results.

The work will also involve enhancing and supporting the core features of a software data analysis workbench (SDA) project at Diamond that we believe may well be the future preferred method of our users analysing their data not only during their visits but also at their home institutes. As SDA is Open Source there may be opportunities to work with collaborators on other similar facilities in the world.

Duties

To work closely with existing software and management staff to support and develop a scientific development and visualisation framework to meet the requirements of the beamline scientists, scientific directors and users and ensure that they are implemented in a timely manner.

• Working with the beamline scientists and the data acquisition team to identify and define requirements for the data analysis and visualization software;
• Management and, if necessary, implementation of required software including appropriate documentation and project plans;
• Work closely with acquisition colleagues to enable the integration of analysis and visualization software into the data acquisition process where appropriate;
• Technical expertise in software techniques and tools to employ;
• Use scientific and technical knowledge to understand and implement data analysis and visualization software;
• Development and use of collaboration across multidisciplinary teams from potentially geographically separated locations;
• Produce project plans and documentation;
• Implement appropriate software testing regimes as part of the development process.

• Degree or equivalent qualification;
• Experience of modern programming languages such as Java, C++ and Python;
• Skilled in developing Java GUI applications in either Eclipse RCP or Swing;
• Experience of UNIX-like operating systems;
• Background in using software engineering techniques for development;
• Self motivated and interested in keeping pace with best practice software development techniques;
• Good interpersonal, communication and presentational skills;
• Ability and initiative to get to the heart of the problem and take it effectively through to completion;
• Good team work;
• Ability to interact effectively with staff at all levels.

• Experience and knowledge of visualisation of multi dimensional data and graphical APIs;
• Use of software development frameworks and applications such as Eclipse RCP;
• Experience or understanding of synchrotron experimentation and data interpretation;
• Requires significant practical experience in a professional, scientific or technical field;
• roject management experience;
• Ablity to supervise or mentor small teams of more junior technical or administrative roles
• Available to travel occasionally in UK and overseas including overnight absences.