Research Software Engineer

Research Software Engineer -  

Location: Gaithersburg (USA) 

  

ABOUT ASTRAZENECA 

  

AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business that focuses on the discovery, development, and commercialisation of prescription medicines for some of the world’s most serious diseases. But we’re more than one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. At AstraZeneca, we’re proud to have a unique workplace culture that inspires innovation and collaboration. Here, employees are empowered to express diverse perspectives and are made to feel valued, energised and rewarded for their ideas and creativity. 

  

ABOUT OUR RESEARCH DATA AND ANALYTICS TEAM 

  

The Research Data & Analytics Team within R&D IT is a global team of highly experienced, skilled data and AI engineers and professionals, passionate about delivering innovative services and products. The mission of our team is to transform the way the R&D discovers and develops medicine through data, analytics, and AI. To achieve this, we partner with scientific teams to deliver ground-breaking capabilities, products and platforms that enable scientists to accelerate medicines that are safe and effective for patients. 

  

SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING PLATFORM 

  

The Scientific Computing platform (SCP) is a foundational capability for HPC and scaled research computing solutions. Embedded within the Research D&A organisation, it is central to analytics products focused on computational chemistry, imaging, multi-OMICs, structural biology, data science and AI. 

We are accountable for the end-to-end delivery of high-performance analytics products, with an emphasis on augmenting the HPC experience. We combine modern HPC with a powerful DevOps stack and cloud-native technologies to power research and development at AstraZeneca. 

  

ROLE PURPOSE 

 

The Research Software Engineering (RSE) role provides scientific and technical software support to scientists and software developers across AstraZeneca 

 

You will collaborate with research colleagues and provide expert knowledge and skills to help them develop, improve, maintain and support high quality software solutions fulfilling the requirements of research projects. You will help grow the knowledge and skills within the research community at all stages of the research software development cycle (e.g. by providing hands-on technical training, coaching sessions and promoting the adoption of standard processes). 

 

  

Key Accountabilities 

• Provide deep research software engineering expertise to assist users in developing, optimising and debugging their workflows and applications 

• Ensure that such work is well documented and results published to the internal research community for maximum reusability 

• Promote best practices for software sustainability and scientific reproducibility within the company 

• Present at internal and external seminars on research software engineering topics 

• Assist with developing an active user community to share learning 

• Work with the rest of the team to ensure that software development tools are suitable for the needs of the research community 

• Develop and deliver technical training and coaching materials 

  

Essential Knowledge, Skills, and Experience 

• Experience in using and developing research software to produce research outputs 

• Significant experience in developing research software in one or more of:  Python, R, C/C++, Java, Go, and including knowledge of advanced parallel and accelerated computing frameworks including MPI and CUDA. 

• Knowledge of and commitment to best practices in software engineering, including documentation, version control and unit testing 

• Strong inter-personal skills, with the ability to adapt communication to users at different technical levels 

• Proven troubleshooting expertise and deep investigation analysis of research computing problems 

 

Desirable Skills and Knowledge 

 

• Scientific degree, and/or experience in computationally intensive analysis of scientific data 

• Experience with build automation and continuous integration 

• Experience in designing and delivering training courses 

• Previous experience in high performance computing (HPC) environments, especially at large scales (>10,000 cores) 

• Experience with workflow engines (e.g Nextflow, Cromwell) 

• Expertise in specific scientific domains relevant to early drug development, such as deep learning, medical imaging, molecular dynamics or 'omics. 

• Experience with working in GxP-validated environments 

• ITIL certification 

 

Plus some of the following areas of experience: 

 

• Experience administering and optimising a HPC job scheduler (e.g. SLURM) 

• Experience with configuration automation and infrastructure as code (e.g. Ansible, Hashicorp Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Cloud Developer Kit) 

• Experience deploying infrastructure and code to public cloud, especially AWS  

• Hands-on experience working in a DevOps team and using agile methodologies 

 

 

Date Posted

22-May-2025

Closing Date

Our mission is to build an inclusive and equitable environment. We want people to feel they belong at AstraZeneca and Alexion, starting with our recruitment process. We welcome and consider applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of characteristics. We offer reasonable adjustments/accommodations to help all candidates to perform at their best. If you have a need for any adjustments/accommodations, please complete the section in the application form.