Location:  Lincoln
Salary:   From £37,099 per annum
Please note, this post is fixed term for 24 months, and full time at 1.0 FTE.
Closing Date:   Sunday 14 January 2024
Interview Date:   Friday 02 February 2024
Reference:  CHS080

Are you an experienced software engineer, looking for an exciting new challenge?

We are seeking to appoint a Research Software Engineer within the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS), who will join our large-scale project, Agri-OpenCore, and is committed to producing high-quality and reusable software components for agricultural robotics. This project is embedded in Lincoln Agri-Robotics, the UK’s largest Research Cluster in Agri-Robotics.

As part of this role, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with world-leading researchers to design, develop, test, and maintain high-quality code, enabling novel research to be performed more efficiently and reliably. This role is focused on facilitating and supporting robotics/AI software development in the context of the Agri-OpenCore project, working as part of a team of academic researchers and industrial collaborators, and embedded in software engineering and DevOps teams of the Agri-Robotics Cluster.

You should hold a post-graduate degree (or equivalent professional experience) in a relevant subject area and must be able to demonstrate an excellent track record in software engineering and the development of robotics projects. Well-organised and open-minded engineers, keen to make robots work and produce long-lived and easily maintained software stacks in an environment where personal development and proactivity are strongly encouraged, are most suited for the role.

Expertise in ROS2 and associated technologies like middleware (DDS in particular), containerisation (e.g. Docker) for development and deployment, and software management and development toolchains (e.g. git bloom), will be beneficial in this role. You should also ideally have significant experience in continuous integration and deployment, collaborative software development and code reviews, and robotics and real-time operation.

The project is based at the University’s Riseholme Campus, where researchers enjoy access to a working farm, woodlands, grasslands, and watercourses, as well as our robotic fruit farm. The site benefits from a free shuttle service to the city centre, dedicated robotics labs, and a well-equipped engineering workshop. Existing infrastructure and resources comprise cloud-based build and deploy infrastructure facilitating continuous integration through GitHub actions, GPU, and CPU computing clusters (OpenStack, Slurm), git-based software repositories, and a dedicated actively maintained ROS distribution of 100s of packages.

If you would like to know more about this exciting opportunity, please contact Prof. Marc Hanheide, Director of L-CAS, at mhanheide@lincoln.ac.uk.

Apply here