Senior Developer

Funding End Date 31 Aug 2028 Hours per week 37 Project Title Senior Project Software Developer (COPO) Months Duration 24 Flexible Options Although full-time hours are available, applications from those interested in working part-time hours are also welcomed.

The Earlham Institute is seeking a versatile full-stack Research Software Engineer (RSE) to join the team behind COPO (Collaborative OPen Omics).

COPO is a production-deployed metadata and data-brokering platform that has been developed and operated at the Institute since 2015. COPO underpins some of the largest biodiversity genomics programmes attempted to date, having brokered more than 80,000 samples from over 4,800 species to public repositories such as the European Nucleotide Archive, with automated validation, expert curation and full audit trails.

The successful candidate will join the small engineering team that builds and operates COPO, contributing across the full stack —frontend interfaces, APIs, and the services that connect them to the platform's validation, curation and submission pipelines. Data visualisation, dashboards and API design will be at the centre of the role, but the post is deliberately broad: COPO supports a range of research communities and projects, and the work varies with the needs of those the platform serves.

This is a broadly scoped full-stack role with metadata validation, translation, visualisation and API design as its primary focus. It suits an engineer who enjoys turning complex scientific data into clear, reliable, well-documented interfaces that researchers and the wider community can depend on. Being a senior, hands-on role, you will own significant components of the project end to end, make day-to-day architectural decisions, and drive delivery to time.

Internal: COPO Team Lead / Group Leader (direction, prioritisation, line management); the COPO development team of fellow engineers and frontend developers (collaboration, code review, and mentoring); EI bioinformaticians and research scientists (scientific and metadata requirements);
Scientific Computing / IT infrastructure teams (compute, storage and platform services); and project managers / programme coordinators (planning, reporting and effort estimates).

External: genomics and biodiversity programmes and projects that COPO supports; EMBL-EBI / ELIXIR services such as ENA and Bio Samples; other public repositories and registries such as Zenodo and Data Cite; metadata-standards communities including RO-Crate, ISA, MIxS, Darwin Core and Bioschemas; and the wider open-source community and downstream COPO users.

Dashboards, data visualisation and data portals

• Design, build and maintain interactive dashboards and public data portals, from data model through to production deployment.
• Translate complex, multi-source scientific metadata into clear, accurate and accessible visualisations.
• Build reporting and summary views that are reproducible and auditable, including snapshots for governance and reporting.
• Apply good practice in accessibility, responsive design and information design so that outputs are usable by researchers and the public alike.

APIs and backend services

• Develop, document and maintain RESTful APIs that expose metadata in multiple formats for internal tools and external consumers.
• Integrate frontend and portal services with COPO's validation, curation and submission pipelines.
• Ensure APIs are performant, versioned, secure and well documented so third parties can build against them with minimal support.

Full-stack engineering and platform contribution

• Contribute across the COPO codebase: frontend, backend and supporting services as a flexible member of a small engineering team.
• Write clean, tested, maintainable code with appropriate use of version control, code review, CI/CD and containerisation (Git, Docker).
• Help deploy and operate COPO instances, working with colleagues on deployment, monitoring, backup and reliability.

Collaboration, standards and support

• Work closely with the technical lead and engineering colleagues to extend the platform and its metadata standards.
• Help add support for new data types and metadata schemas, and reflect these in the interfaces and APIs you build.
• Support research users onboarding onto the platform, including documentation, tutorials and responsive help.
• Produce clear technical documentation and contribute to open-source releases under permissive licences.
• As agreed with line manager, any other duties commensurate with the nature of the role.

Requirement Importance Degree (or equivalent professional/practical experience) in computer science, software engineering, bioinformatics or a related discipline Essential

Requirement Importance Proficiency with version control (Git) and collaborative development workflows, including code review Essential Understanding of FAIR data…