Open Source Research Software Engineer: Computational Infrastructure (0652) Job #87957 - Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)

At the University of California, Berkeley , we are dedicated to fostering a community where everyone feels welcome and can thrive. Our culture of openness, freedom, and belonging makes it a special place for students, faculty, and staff, who are among the most talented and accomplished anywhere, including Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and MacArthur Fellows. Since our founding in 1868, we have been an engine for innovation - driving intellectual, economic, and social progress that benefits California, the U.S., and beyond. Together, we change the world.

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Since its launch in 2013, BIDS has been dedicated to accelerating data-driven discovery by fostering an environment of open inquiry and cross-disciplinary collaboration. We have successfully broken down traditional academic silos, uniting domain experts from the life, physical, and social sciences, as well as the arts and humanities, with methodological leaders in computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics.

BIDS is expertly positioned as the central hub for advancing interdisciplinary data science research, academic training, and software development within the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. BIDS houses UC Berkeley's Open Source Program Office and champions open science, open source software, and open scholarship. We serve as a discipline-agnostic space to rally Berkeley’s unique ecosystem, driving forward innovative collaborations that explore the profound impacts of Artificial Intelligence on both science and society.

UC Berkeley and UCSF have launched a joint program called the Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative to develop the frontier of AI and biomedicine, tremendously accelerating advances in clinical care. The new partnership brings together world-class faculty expertise in computing, AI, statistics, biology, and medicine, to speed discovery in everything from disease prevention, to early detection and new therapeutics in healthcare.

As part of this effort, at BIDS our team of open source research software engineers (OS-RSEs), product managers, and computational postdoctoral researchers will build the BioJupyter platform. Based on the widely adopted architecture of Project Jupyter and developed as part of the existing Jupyter ecosystem, with advancements and contributions to existing Jupyter components as well as the development of new tools, BioJupyter will bring next-generation features to facilitate collaboration in data-intensive, AI-powered biomedical research. These will include, but not be limited to, advances in core Jupyter components for collaboration and data sharing across deployments in separate hosting environments (ranging from local clusters and HPC facilities to the cloud), integration of AI agents and tools into the research workflow, sharing of intermediate results, code and pre-publication outputs with fine-grained access control, and fluid integration of these Jupyter deployments alongside existing research tools and environments that are independent of Jupyter.

OS-RSEs bring software engineering expertise and open source development practices to interdisciplinary projects. They play the role of an "expert collaborator" who solves problems at the intersection of research, software, and modern computing infrastructure. They regularly investigate -- and propose solutions to -- open-ended, unstructured challenges that arise from the computational needs of researchers. They scope, and deliver on technical requirements that require an in-depth evaluation of cutting-edge data science and AI applications. They are integral members of a diverse team, co-creating the BioJupyter platform to solve real-world challenges in the biomedical sciences.

OS-RSEs work closely with senior researchers, industry partners, and stakeholders across global scientific open source projects in the Jupyter ecosystem, as well as those of the computational tools used by our researchers today, including Scientific Python, R, and beyond. They create, improve, and maintain parts of the open source software ecosystem that underpins global innovation in data science and AI. They advocate for open science and open scholarship best practices, and meet national and global standards around responsible and ethical uses of technology. They showcase research outputs and software tools to the research community and industry partners through presentations, research papers, blog posts, interactive data visualizations, and open source software packages.

This is a designated position requiring fingerprinting and a background check due to the nature of the job responsibilities. Berkeley does hire people with conviction histories and reviews information received in the context of the job responsibilities. The University reserves the right to make employment contingent upon successful completion of the background check.

As a condition of employment, the final candidate who accepts a conditional offer of employment will be required to disclose if they have been subject to any final administrative or judicial decisions within the last seven years determining that they committed any misconduct; received notice of any allegations or are currently the subject of any administrative or disciplinary proceedings involving misconduct; have left a position after receiving notice of allegations or while under investigation in an administrative or disciplinary proceeding involving misconduct; or have filed an appeal of a finding of misconduct with a previous employer.

“Misconduct” means any violation of the policies or laws governing conduct at the applicant’s previous place of employment, including, but not limited to, violations of policies or laws prohibiting sexual harassment, sexual assault, or other forms of harassment, discrimination, dishonesty, or unethical conduct, as defined by the employer. For reference, below are UC’s policies addressing some forms of misconduct:

UC Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy UC Anti-Discrimination Policy Abusive Conduct in the Workplace

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, protected veteran status, or other protected status under state or federal law.