Graduate Research Software Engineer - Graduate Scheme 2025

The salary for this role is £32,729.

This role requires employees to complete an online Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS), including The Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) checks for criminal convictions.

UKAEA’s two-year graduate scheme is split by 80% of your time developing both your general work-related skills and professional qualifications and 20% of your working time dedicated to graduate training and development.  Within the graduate training and development, there is a core suite of activities designed to develop your professional and business skills. Elements of this programme are flexible and can be tailored to your personal development needs and to those of your specific job role.

The Role

UKAEA's Research Software Engineering (RSE) group provides a central source of software engineering skills and knowledge that supports the delivery of high-quality software for use across our wide range of research areas.

You will contribute to research software projects under the supervision of more experienced members of the team, working with expert scientists and engineers to understand and solve their software needs. Some examples of potential areas in which you may apply your software engineering skills include:

• Plasma Physics;
• Engineering Simulation;
• Data Analysis;
• and High-Performance Computing.

We also have expanding SecDevOps/MLOps capabilities, where we look to leverage novel technologies and good industry practices (such as Infrastructure-/Configuration-as-Code, automation, and monitoring) to support software in production.

Alongside project work, you will spend a portion of your time assisting UKAEA scientists and engineers with their software activities through contributions to software training as well as direct help and advice.

Projects and activities will be structured to give you the experience and knowledge needed as the foundations of a career in RSE, while taking account of organisational needs and your own career aspirations.

Additional Responsibilities:

• Organise your own time to deliver tasks and maintain communication about progress
• Contribute to improving software development practices across the organisation, for example by giving talks, writing guidance and examples, or helping to run evens within UKAEA's software engineering community
• Engage with relevant research and RSE communities to learn and contribute through online channels and at events

Essential Requirements:

• Degree in a relevant subject such as Physics, Maths, Engineering or Computer Science 
• Experience of developing working, understandable software in more than one programming language (ideally including both interpreted and compiled languages)  
• Ability to apply some software design principles and enthusiasm to develop this further 
• Ability to use good software engineering practices such as version control and testing  
• Some familiarity with Linux operating systems and the command line 
• Appetite to research and learn new technologies 
• Sufficient scientific and mathematical background to discuss scientific software with domain experts  
• Ability to work as part of a team and communicate effectively in both technical and non-technical terms 

A full list of our benefits can be found here https://careers.ukaea.uk/life-at-ukaea/employee-benefits/

We welcome applications from under-represented groups, particularly individuals from black and other ethnic minority backgrounds, people with disabilities, and women. Our Executive team, supported by our 'Equality, Diversity and Inclusion' (EDI) Partner and Inclusion Ambassadors, actively promotes EDI and takes steps to increase diversity within our organization. We reinforce best practices in recruitment and selection and evaluate approaches to remove barriers to success.

Please note that vacancies are generally advertised for 4 weeks but may close earlier if we receive a large number of applications.