Your role: Research Software Engineer (RSE)

Introduction

Research software engineers (RSE) in the life sciences design, develop and maintain software systems that help researchers manage their software and data. The RSE’s software tools and infrastructure are critical in enabling scientific research to be conducted effectively.

In this role, it is essential that you implement software systems that meet the needs and requirements of researchers. Software needs to be reliable, scalable, secure, well-documented, and easy to use.

You often work in research-intensive environments such as universities, research institutions, or government agencies. Collaboration with researchers, data scientists, data managers, and IT professionals is vital.

Data management responsibilities

As a research software engineer, your focus is on the liaison between researchers and people involved in IT infrastructure and services. You are responsible for the implementation of IT infrastructure solutions and the access to data and software.

In your role of research software engineer, you may need to:

Identify the requirements of and provide access to data infrastructure and tool landscape for researchers according to the research data management policies;
Advise and assist researchers on short and long term actions for data infrastructure and tools including (meta)data standards;
Ensure the compliance of the data infrastructure and tool landscape with codes of conduct and regulations;
Align the data infrastructure and tool landscape to the FAIR data principles and the principles of Open Science, and facilitate and support FAIR data;
Align the data infrastructure and tools management inside and outside the organisation, in close collaboration with the IT department;
Facilitate the availability of local data-infrastructure and tools for FAIR and long term archiving of data.

Data management guidance

RDMkit pages

The data organisation page helps with file naming, versioning and folder structures.
Data documentation, such as README files and metadata, helps to make data understandable and reusable.
The identifiers page gives advice on how to create and use identifiers. Machine actionability helps to automatically access and process research data.
Consider the best practices and technical solutions for data analysis.
Data protection helps you to make research data GDPR-compliant.
Data sensitivity helps you to identify sensitivity of different research data types.
Licensing gives advice on how to assign a licence to research data.
Consult the data transfer page for information about transferring large data files.
The data brokering page provides information on uploading data to repositories and metadata requirements for the process.
The data storage page helps to consider short and long-term storage, during and at the end of a project.

Other resources

FAIR Principles gives an overview of how to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).
FAIR Cookbook gives step by step recipes for common data management tasks, including levels and indicators of FAIRness, technologies, tools and the standards available.
FAIRsharing is a portal where you can search for databases, standards and policies.
Learn from experts in the field in the RDNL & DCC Delivery RDM Services course.
Software Carpentry helps set up training in basic lab skills for research computing.
ELN Guide is a useful resource on Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN).

More information

National resources

Tools and resources tailored to users in different countries.

Tool or resource	Description	Related pages	Registry
Belnet	Belnet is the privileged partner of higher education, research and administration for connectivity. We provide high-bandwidth internet access and related services for our specific target groups.	Data Steward Researcher Data transfer
Flemish Supercomputing Center (VSC)	VSC is the Flanders’ most highly integrated high-performance research computing environment, providing world-class services to government, industry, and researchers.	Data Steward Data analysis Data storage
PIPPA	PIPPA, the PSB Interface for Plant Phenotype Analysis, is the central web interface and database that provides the tools for the management of the plant imaging robots on the one hand, and the analysis of images and data on the other hand.	Plant Phenomics Plant sciences Data Steward Researcher	Tool info
Czech National Repository	National Repository (NR) is a service provided to the scientific and research communities in the Czech Republic to store their generated research data together with persistent DOI identifier. NR service is currently under the pilot program.	Researcher Data Steward Data storage Existing data Identifiers Data management plan
e-INFRA CZ (Supercomputing and Data Services)	e-INFRA CZ provides integrated high-performance research computing/data storage environment, providing world-class services to government, industry, and researchers. It also cooperates with European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) implementation in the Czech Republic.	Data Steward Data analysis Data storage
ownCloud@CESNET	CESNET-hosted ownCloud is a 100 GB cloud storage freely available for Czech scientists to manage their data from any research projects. ownCloud	Researcher Data storage Data organisation
ELN Finder	Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) selection service.	Documentation and meta... Researcher
ELN Guide	Guide for Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN).	Documentation and meta... Researcher
ELN Video Tutorials	Video Tutorials for Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN).	Documentation and meta... Researcher
Datos.gob.es	Open data portal of the spanish government. A meeting point for the various actors that make up the open data ecosystem.	Researcher Data Steward
Recolecta	The national aggregator of open access repositories. This platform brings together all the Spanish digital infrastructures in which open access research results are published and / or deposited.	Researcher Data Steward
Red Española de Supercomputación	The Spanish Supercomputing Network’s mission is to offer the resources and services of supercomputing and data management necessary for the development of innovative and high-quality scientific and technological projects, through competitive calls based on the scientific excellence of the projects to be developed.	Researcher Data Steward
RedIRIS	Spanish academic and research network that provides advanced communication services to the scientific community and national universities.	Researcher Data Steward
Chipster	Chipster is a user-friendly analysis software for high-throughput data such as RNA-seq and single cell RNA-seq. It contains analysis tools and a large reference genome collection.	CSC Researcher Data analysis

Contributors