British Antarctic Survey Hiring for Scientific Software Developer Job at Cambridge, East of England, England Full Time

Description

British Antarctic Survey are looking for a Scientific Software Developer to improve and enhance the primary data acquisition system used onboard the UK’s new polar research vessel, the RRS Sir David Attenborough. This is a great opportunity to make a real difference as we prepare the vessel to conduct vital research in the polar regions. The role will likely involve periods of time onboard, working alongside a wide variety of scientists, engineers, and data managers, to make sure the invaluable data collected are as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) as possible. While great technical skills and a commitment to BAS’s vision are a must, we welcome applicants from a range of different disciplines and career stages.

The UK Polar Data Centre (PDC) is the focal point for Arctic and Antarctic environmental data management in the UK.
Part of the NERC Environmental Data Service and based at BAS, it coordinates the management of polar data from
UK-funded research and supports researchers in complying with national and international data legislation and policy.
We are a small friendly team comprising specialist data managers, software developers and web developers passionate about Open Data and ensuring that data collected today will be understandable and usable long into the future. Find out more about our work at https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/uk-pdc/.

Purpose

To support the ongoing development of a Research Vessel Data Acquisition System (RVDAS) used onboard the RRS Sir
David Attenborough. Working with data and IT staff from BAS and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), you will implement high priority enhancement requests to the core software, and you will lead a task to integrate an existing
(but separate) event logging system into RVDAS. The software is written in Python and NodeJS, it has a
Postgres/TimescaleDB backend, and uses Grafana for data visualisation.

The RVDAS acquisition module currently timestamps and stores the outputs of 50+ onboard sensors that are continuously recording a wide variety of parameters including position, attitude, depth, meteorology, oceanography, gravity, winch, engine, and lab monitoring data. RVDAS is currently logging 500+ data messages per second and newly commissioned sensors continue to be integrated into the software.

Event information provides context to the data streams and may include (for example) the start time of an instrument deployment, or a period where a sensor was faulty. While some of these events can be inferred from the source data, most are recorded by cruise participants whilst onboard. You will work closely with these end-users while developing the RVDAS event logging module.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Create an RVDAS event logging module based on functionality in a pre-existing product

(Perl/MySQL) and implement event logging enhancements requested by end-users.

• Implement high priority enhancements to the existing RVDAS data logging system.

• Liaise with end-users (researchers, data managers, IT staff, engineers etc.) to ensure that technical solutions match their expectations. May require time onboard the vessel while actively collecting scientific data.

• Setup an effective shared development workflow between the BAS and NOC teams, including staff working onboard vessels with limited bandwidth connections.

• Create and update technical documentation describing RVDAS functionality.

Job Type: Full-time

Salary: £39,784.00-£50,790.00 per year

Schedule:

• Monday to Friday

Reference ID: BAS 22/115