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

If you are high calibre software engineer used to programming in advanced object based languages, we can offer you a challenging and interesting role at one of the pre-eminent scientific facilities of its type in the world. You would work within a group of software professional software developers who implement software solutions for the acquisition of scientific data at the Diamond source located on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in South Oxfordshire. The keywords in our search would be technical mastery of object oriented programming languages such as Java and their development tools, solid software engineering skills coupled with good communication with clients and colleagues. Experience in a scientific environment would also help in supporting our scientists and the cutting edge science performed here. 

In more detail:
Implement, support and enhance software for Data Acquisition applicable across all Diamond Beamlines. The role holder will work closely with the beamline scientists and users of Diamond to examine their user operation, first to establish requirements for data acquisition and then ensure that they are implemented.

• Working with the beamline scientists and the data analysis team to define and document requirements for experimental beamlines;
• Use advanced programming tools and object oriented languages to design, implement and support the data acquisition software for one or more Diamond beamlines;
• Writing scripting software for the advanced control of instrumentation associated with experimental beamlines;
• Core Data Acquisition (GDA) code development;
• Defining, documenting and implementing testing strategies for data acquisition software;
• Develop and maintain expertise in software techniques, and apply them to the development of new software applications and associated frameworks;
• Provide a technical advisory/support function within area of expertise to other departments or divisions;
• Maintain responsibility for the management and co-ordination of own workload and ensure outputs delivered on time and to high quality;
• First line support of the software for one for more Diamond beamline interacting closely with both beamline staff and external users.

• First degree or equivalent qualification; 
• Ability and initiative to get to the heart of the problem and take it effectively through to completion; 
• Ability to supervise or mentor small teams of more junior technical or administrative roles; 
• Good interpersonal, communication  and presentational skills; 
• Enjoys team work; 
• Self motivated, interested in keeping pace with software testing best practises; 
• Ability to interact effectively with staff at all levels; 
• Use of software development frameworks and applications such as Eclipse; 
• Experience of modern programming languages such as Java, C, C++ and Python;
• Background in using software engineering techniques for development; 
• Requires significant practical experience in a professional, scientific or technical field.

• Available to travel occasionally in UK and overseas including overnight absences;
• Experience of UNIX-like operating systems and their administration;
• Experience of interfacing software to hardware;
• Experience of GUI development;
• Project management experience.

Diamond is committed to equality of opportunities for all, and offer a competitive salary (dependent upon skills, qualifications and experience), comprehensive benefits, an index-linked pension scheme and flexible working hours.