Job Description

Title : Research Development Software Engineer

Location: Cambridge, UK- 50 % on site

End date: 30th June 26 (12 months intent)

Location: A minimum of 50% per week is expected onsite rising to 60% at some point in the future.

Required

• Strong software engineering skills in Python, with demonstrable experience building maintainable, well-tested, and production-quality systems, together with strong engineering hygiene practices including testing, code review, and documentation.
• Experience building and maintaining APIs, backend services, and web applications using frameworks such as FastAPI or Django.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and deployment of Azure-hosted or similar cloud services.
• Experience designing and building data pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and storage at reasonable scale.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to work with evolving requirements, translate research goals into practical technical solutions, and debug complex systems.
• Experience with frontend development, ideally React and TypeScript.
• Demonstrated ability to work in environments with high uncertainty, e.g., completed PhD or substantial R&D or startup experience.

This focuses more on the engineering aspects than before:

• Shifted emphasis from evaluation/research to platform engineering, APIs, data pipelines, deployment, and operational reliability
• Added CI/CD, monitoring, containerisation, and deployment as explicit responsibilities
• Moved ML/evaluation experience from required to preferred
• Made Python engineering skills the lead qualification rather than PhD
• Added API/backend frameworks and cloud infrastructure as required experience
• Reduced references to human studies and community evaluation workflows