Job Description

Ref Number

B01-05049

Professional Expertise

IT and Digital

Department

Vice-President (Operations) (B01)

Location

London

Working Pattern

Full time

Salary

54,172-63,752

Contract Type

Permanent

Working Type

Hybrid

Available for Secondment

No

Closing Date

08-Jun-2025

About us

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UCL is a world-leading teaching and research university, often ranked in the top ten in the world with an annual turnover of well over 1 billion. Part of UCL's vision is to take on the hardest global challenges.



The UCL Centre for Advanced Research Computing (ARC) is UCL's new institute for infrastructure and innovation in digital research - the supercomputers, datasets, software, and people that make computational science and digital scholarship possible.

We describe our research professionals within four groupings - Research Software Developers, Research Infrastructure Developers, Research Data Stewards, and Research Data Scientists - knowing that these are fluid categories, and welcome those who cross the boundaries between these.



This post will sit primarily within the Research Infrastructure Developers job family. Research Infrastructure Developers also known as Research Infrastructure Engineers, Research Data Engineers, ML-Ops, Res-Ops, Dev-Ops Engineer, etc., and you may agree with your line manager to modify your job title to reflect your career aspirations.

About the role

------------------


ARC roles can be both research roles, contributing to the scholarly life of the university, carrying out research and teaching, and professional service roles, delivering shared capabilities and following professional best practice.



You will be part of ARC's community of staff scientists and research technology professionals, both delivering the services and systems which make data and compute-intensive research possible, and discovering and innovating new tools, practices, and systems in this field.



Our positioning as a hybrid of a research institute and service centre means these activities will be synergistic. This could mean building on your background to remain close to the research life of one or more of the academic disciplines we collaborate with or engaging closely with the technology professional communities related to a platform, tool, or language that you focus on. You will work with your management to define a portfolio of responsibilities, a mixture of service delivery, research, innovation, and teaching activities according to your own preferences and skills, and appropriate to your level of seniority.



This role will help design, develop and automate private-cloud infrastructure at ARC using cloud-native tools and modern infrastructure as code techniques. You'll have the opportunity to work across the entire stack, from automating firewall configuration and networking, to designing CI/CD pipelines and building user-facing tools with Kubernetes. You'll also work closely with other teams across ARC to help architect computing environments for a wide variety of research purposes.



A brilliant all-round role, which will suit passionate individuals who enjoy consistent challenges and have the ability to work at a 'best in class' level.

About you

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We are particularly interested in hearing from people with skills and experience (or a strong willingness to learn!) in the following:


Kubernetes, Docker and Containerisation Devops - CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (including tools such as Terraform, GitHub Actions, Ansible) Virtualisation (especially Harvester/Rancher)

To be considered for this role candidates will be required to have qualifications, skills and experience in the following:


PhD Degree OR equivalent professional expertise appropriate to the role. Practical knowledge of operating systems and their maintenance, directory & authentication technologies, and TCP/IP networking, including familiarity with common Internet protocols. Demonstrable understanding of at least one area of specialism within digital research infrastructures. Experience with the Linux command line shell. Automation of processes with appropriate versionable languages. Experience authoring technical documents to a high standard. Experience in a number of successfully completed complex technical projects, having had a leading role in bringing about those successes (either technically or managerially).

Sound like you and in interested? Then please reach out to me for further information about and more information about the role and UCL!



Salary range for grade 8 Senior Research Software Engineer is 51,474 to 65,698 including London Allowance depending on experience. USS pension Scheme offers staff contribute 6.1% and UCL will contribute 14.6%



The job description and person specification for this post can be downloaded from the link at the bottom of this page.

What we offer

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As well as the exciting opportunities this role presents we also offer some great benefits some of which are below:


41 Days holiday (including 27 days annual leave 8 bank holiday and 6 closure days) This post is eligible for USS Pension Scheme + defined benefit scheme
+ staff contribute 6.1% and UCL will contribute 14.6%
+ Life insurance is included (3x salary)
Cycle to work scheme and season ticket loan On-Site nursery On-site gym Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption pay Employee assistance programme Discounted medical insurance

Visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/rewards-and-benefits to find out more.

Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

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As London's Global University, we know diversity fosters creativity and innovation, and we want our community to represent the diversity of the world's talent. We are committed to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where we all belong.



We therefore particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL's workforce