Member of Technical Staff: Research Software Engineer (0652) Job #88102 - BIDS

Job

Location:

Main Campus-Berkeley

Full Time

At the University of California, Berkeley, we are dedicated to fostering a community where everyone feels welcome and can thrive. Our culture of openness, freedom, and belonging makes it a special place for students, faculty, and staff, who are among the most talented and accomplished anywhere, including Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and Mac Arthur Fellows. Since our founding in 1868, we have been an engine for innovation - driving intellectual, economic, and social progress that benefits California, the U.S., and beyond.

Together, we change the world.

At Berkeley, the best careers are built on a foundation of continuous learning and growth. We actively support professional development by providing all full-time staff employees with at least 80 hours of paid time per year and providing space for supportive colleague communities via numerous employee resource groups.

We invite applicants who are inspired by our Principles of Community and who are eager to be part of our exciting Strategic Plan, which charts Berkeley's next era of excellence.

Learn more about some of our accomplishments at Points of Pride.

Since its launch in 2013, BIDS has been dedicated to accelerating data-driven discovery by fostering an environment of open inquiry and cross-disciplinary collaboration. We have successfully broken down traditional academic silos, uniting domain experts from the life, physical, and social sciences, as well as the arts and humanities, with methodological leaders in computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics.

BIDS is expertly positioned as the central hub for advancing interdisciplinary data science research, academic training, and software development within the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. BIDS houses UC Berkeley's Open Source Program Office and champions open science, open source software, and open scholarship. We serve as a discipline-agnostic space to rally Berkeley's unique ecosystem, driving forward innovative collaborations that explore the profound impacts of Artificial Intelligence on both science and society.

AI is changing what's tractable in scientific research, enhancing scientists' ability to tackle ambitious and far-reaching research questions; however, it also risks outpacing the community's already strained capacity to scrutinize new work, thereby eroding the rigor that makes the scientific cannon worth building on. Without infrastructure that makes AI‑assisted workflows legible, the production of new work risks outpacing our ability to evaluate it, eroding the rigor that makes the scientific record worth building on.

Lightcone Research is an international initiative building infrastructure for rigorous AI‑assisted computational science, to help ensure that the expanded reach enabled by AI strengthens that record rather than weakening it.

Research Software Engineers (RSEs) bring software engineering expertise and open source development practices to Lightcone’s developer and user community. They play the role of an "expert collaborator" who solves problems at the intersection of research, software, and modern computing infrastructure. They regularly investigate — and propose solutions to — open-ended, unstructured challenges that arise from the computational needs of researchers. They scope, and deliver on technical requirements that require an in-depth evaluation of cutting edge data science and AI applications.

They are integral members of a diverse team, co‑creating the Lightcone ecosystem of open source tools to solve real world challenges in the space of AI assisted scientific research.

This role will work closely with senior researchers and industry partners. They advocate for open science and open scholarship best practices, and meet national and global standards around responsible and ethical uses of technology. They showcase research outputs and software tools to the research community and industry partners through presentations, research papers, blog posts, interactive data visualizations and open source software packages.