Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility. Located on the Harwell Science & Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire a 20 minute drive south of Oxford in a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Diamond Light Source conducts world-class research in virtually all fields of science and offers rewarding career opportunities covering both technical and scientific disciplines.

We are looking for a high calibre software engineer to join our dynamic scientific software group working on visualization and analysis of data from experiments at Diamond. In collaboration with world leading software groups such the Eclipse foundation and our internal software groups, the role will share the responsibility for the provision of software applications for advanced data evaluation, analysis and visualization for users of Diamond facilities. These applications exploit the very latest techniques and high performance computing 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 group of experienced software scientists and engineers and will work with our scientists to identify and define requirements for data analysis and visualization applications. You will ensure that they are implemented in a timely and effective way. Working with our data acquisition team you will help optimize and record 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 (DAWN) project being worked on in Diamond. DAWN is an Open Source project so there will be opportunities to work with collaborators at other similar facilities worldwide.

Responsibilities / 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.

• Experience of modern programming languages such as Java, Javascript, C++ and Python;
• Experience of test driven development including unit testing, continuous integration and GUI testing frameworks such as Squish;
• Use of software development frameworks and applications such as Eclipse RCP;
• Experience of GUI development and design;
• Ability and initiative to get to the heart of the problem and take it effectively through to completion;
• Good interpersonal, communication  and presentational skills;
• Enjoys team work;
• Self motivated, interested in keeping pace with best practise software development techniques;
• Ability to interact effectively with staff at all levels;
• Background in using software engineering techniques for development.

• Experience of UNIX-like operating systems;
• Experience and knowledge of visualisation of multi dimensional data and graphical APIs;
• Practical experience in a professional, scientific or technical field;
• Ability to supervise or mentor small teams of more junior technical or administrative roles;
• Project management experience;
• Available to travel occasionally in UK and overseas including overnight absences;
• Experience or understanding of synchrotron experimentation and data interpretation.