University of Bristol Hiring for Research Associate/Senior Research Associate (Research Software Engineer) Job at Bristol, England Full Time

The role

The Particle Physics group at the University of Bristol (tinyurl.com/particle-bristol) is seeking a talented programmer, preferably with experience in particle physics, to develop modern software for physics data analysis as part of the SWIFT-HEP and FAST-HEP initiatives.

The group is involved in several current and future experiments directly connected to the proposed software development, including CMS, LHCb, DUNE and LZ. We lead physics data analyses in all of these and possess significant expertise in triggering, data acquisition and software development. The successful candidate will work closely with the different experiments to understand analysis needs and to develop and performance-test benchmark scenarios.

What will you be doing?

The successful candidate will lead the Bristol Particle Physics group’s contributions to the SWIFT-HEP and FAST-HEP software development initiatives.

SWIFT-HEP (SoftWare InFrastructure and Technology for High Energy Physics) is a UK software initiative, addressing the challenges particle physics faces from the large data sets collected by future experiments. New software and algorithmic techniques are required to handle their production rate, volume, and complexity. The successful candidate will contribute to the Analysis work package of the project which concentrates on common tools that are needed to serve data to analysers and allow fast turn-around analysis work.

FAST-HEP is a Python-based analysis toolkit, using analysis tools from both the data science and HEP community to address the challenges of reproducibility and performance in physics data analysis. The successful candidate will improve the current software to incorporate latest developments in the field and ready the toolkit for GPU processing. This includes the development of a set of benchmarks and real world examples based on uses within, e.g., CMS, LZ and DUNE.

You should apply if

The successful candidate will be a competent programmer with experience in Python and ideally other modern programming languages. You will want to drive software development for the next generation of particle physics experiments.

You will be familiar with basic software engineering practices, such as versioning with Git, unit testing and continuous integration. You will have experience with distributed data analysis on high throughput computing systems, e.g., the World-wide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG).

Experience with the PyHEP ecosystem, acceleration and distributed computing packages and a good understanding of particle physics analysis workflows is desirable.

We welcome applications from all members of our community and are particularly encouraging those from diverse groups, such as members of the LGBT+ and BAME communities, to join us.

Available documents

• ACAD105791 – Research Associate-Senior Research Associate – JD.pdf
• Further Particulars – School of Physics 2021.pdf