Computing Software Engineer Summer Placement

Science and Technology Facilities Council
Salary: £23,493 per annum
Contract Type:
Fixed Term - 12 weeks
Hours:
Full-time
Location: Daresbury Laboratory, Keckwick Lane, Daresbury, WA4 4AD

Closing date: 8th March 2026
Interview:
Virtually via Microsoft Teams in April 2026
Start date:
July 2026

The Hartree Centre helps UK businesses and organisations of any size to explore and adopt supercomputing, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for enhanced productivity, smarter innovation and economic growth. Backed by significant UK government funding and strategic partnerships with industry leaders such as IBM, Atos and the University of Liverpool, the Hartree Centre is home to some of the most advanced digital technologies and experts in the UK.
Our experts collaborate with industry and the research community in all sectors to explore the latest emerging technologies, upskill teams, and apply practical digital solutions to individual and industry-wide challenges for societal and economic benefit

Hartree’s High-Performance Software Engineering Group specialises in developing and optimising scientific software for use on high-performance computers. Your role will be to contribute to the automatic parallelisation and analysis tools that the group develops to assist the UK Met Office perform their weather and climate simulations. You will have the opportunity to participate in the development of an open-source tool, to dig into the computational performance details of microbenchmarks, understand how well applications make use of the latest GPU and CPU hardware and investigate how they might be improved.

We're an enthusiastic and friendly team that will actively support the successful student by offering flexible mentoring, both in person and online, to ensure they feel guided, confident, and supported throughout their time with us.

This placement will give you the opportunity to:

• Develop your skills in scientific/technical software development as a member of an international team;
• Learn how such software maps onto hardware and the implications this has for performance;
• Learn about the software-development cycle and gain experience in contributing to open-source software;
• Learn how compilers may be used to tune software performance;
• Learn how to use GPUs to accelerate scientific/technical software.

STFC’s incredibly diverse range of placements allow you to work alongside world leading engineers, scientists, and technicians in highly collaborative environments. Whichever you choose, you will become a critical member of the team in which you will be exposed to exciting projects and challenges from the start. You will also be supported every step of the way by our dedicated Early Careers Development Team

Within this placement, responsibilities will include:

• Build, run and measure the performance of benchmark software on CPU and GPU;
• Report and discuss results with wider team;
• Contribute to open-source software developed by the team.

The below criteria will be scored during Shortlisting (S), Interview (I) or both (S&I).

In order to apply for the role, we are looking for the following:

• You are in full time education at university, and will be returning to university/your studies to complete your undergraduate degree once the summer placement has concluded (S)
• You have the right to live and work in the UK for the duration of the placement (S)
• You are studying for an undergraduate degree in a computational, scientific or mathematical subject area (S)
• Able to develop in a compiled language (e.g. Fortran, C, C++)
• You are able to program in Python (S&I)
• You are interested in performance optimisation and making use of new computer hardware (S&I)
• You enjoy learning new things and having the freedom to investigate problems (I)
• You enjoy working as part of a team and are able to communicate effectively with other team members (S&I)

• Experience using Linux (S)

We are offering a fixed term position with a whole host of benefits including:

• 30 days holiday pro rata
• Flexible working hours.
• Easily accessible public transport…