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.

Over the past decade, Diamond Light Source and its European collaborators have made targeted resource investments in key science domains that have made international exemplars in metadata capture, experiment data and results provenance along with intuitive interfaces to enable research. This and future planned upcoming roles signifies a significant new investment to broaden the initiatives scope from these initial domains to over 1000 industry and academic proposals awarded experiment time at the facility annually.

The role is within the Scientific Software Group and will lead a new team of developers, off-site contractors and work closely with existing in house groups and international collaborators. The aim is to extend or establish a framework for capturing and interacting with sample tracking, experiment planning, data collection steering, automated data analysis, interoperable results and eventually methods and model publication and deposition.

It is foreseen that the person recruited would have experience of Software Engineering and/or related scientific field as well as data and information management. For employment at higher level, the person should combine good software development expertise with a background in scientific information delivery and software project and team management.

Duties / Responsibilities

Implement, support and enhance software for capturing, visualisation and reporting Experiment Information on all Diamond facilities.

• Requirement gathering, management and implementation of experiment information management software to be improve processes across Diamond facilities;
• Lead the application of detailed experiment and process modeling to develop appropriate software solutions for cataloguing experiments at Diamond;
• Collaborate with external groups in the planning and implementation cross disciplinary multi user and multi-site experiment management;
• Managing existing implementations specifically ISPyB and related software;
• Mentor the work of one or more software scientists;
• Maintain and continue development of the existing interfaces in SynchLink, SynchWeb and within DAWN;
• Use technical knowledge of data management and distributed computing, to advise on future hardware and software requirements;
• Where possible, assimilate scientific knowledge of beamline use, liaise with data analysis colleagues and apply this to optimize the associated acquisition software;
• Foster the use of test driven software development and deployment, and help expand its use into other areas of data analysis processing pipelines;
• Generally deliver specialised work either as part of a project team or a specialist department to support broader departmental goals.

• First degree in engineering, computing or science;
• Ability to supervise or mentor small teams of more junior technical or administrative roles;
• Good interpersonal, communication  and presentational skills;
• Ability to interact effectively with staff at all levels;
• Ability and initiative to get to the heart of the problem and take it effectively through to completion;
• Self motivated;
• Use of information or data management and models in the context of data analysis and processing;
• Use of software development frameworks and applications such as Eclipse;
• Experience of modern programming languages such as Java, C, C++ and Python, and software tools for delivering and visualising large complex data;
• Experience of developing Javascript and/or PHP applications;
• Experience of software testing systems in delivering robust services;
• Requires significant practical experience in a professional, scientific or technical field;
• A track record of project management and leading a small team.

• PhD in appropriate discipline;
• Experience or understanding of synchrotron experimentation or science data interpretation;
• Must be available to travel occasionally in UK and overseas including overnight absences.