Research Software Engineer at the XMaS Beamline Grade 7

Applications are invited for a Research Software Engineer to work with the E.P.S.R.C. National Research Facility XMaS, the UK Collaborating Research Group synchrotron beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. The principal role is to implement the recently-developed Python-based control software BLISS at the XMaS beamline. BLISS was developed with an object-oriented and plug-in based scanning and sequencing engine written in Python and using Tango as the high-level distributed system. This new system is already operational at most ESRF beamlines but still needs to be deployed at XMaS/BM28.

You will be responsible for the planning, implementation and commissioning of BLISS on the XMaS beamline, the development of new control system features required and the development and installation of data acquisition protocols. You will join a team of four permanent XMaS staff members and will collaborate with the ESRF Beamline Control Unit (BCU), contributing to these developments. The BCU is responsible for the control system of 42 beamlines at the ESRF, as well as the maintenance, development and deployment of BLISS on all these beamlines.

Your missions will be the following:

• Planning, installation and commissioning of the BLISS control system on XMaS;
• Development and documentation of new required features in the control system;
• Development and documentation of modules to integrate new hardware;
• Development and commissioning of high-speed data acquisition systems for new experiments;
• Beamline automation to hide complexity from users;
• Software support for experiments: coordination with scientists, project follow-up, improvements and trouble- shooting.

This position provides an exciting opportunity to develop computational skills, in collaboration with expert programming groups (BCU, ADU, ADA ¿). You must be an excellent communicator, capable of working effectively both independently and as part of collaborative research teams (scientific, computational ¿). You will possess excellent planning and time management skills to ensure your programming and development objectives are achieved effectively. The post is available for 18 months commencing as soon as possible.

The University has the right to close the vacancy early if it is deemed that there have been enough applications received