Software Engineer

Salary - £40,574 - £43,056 Depending on experience
Hybrid working (50/50)

Two vacancies
Location: Lancaster
Closing date: Friday 30th October 2026

We reserve the right to close this advert early if we find the right candidate, so we encourage you to apply early.

UKCEH is looking for two experienced software engineers to join a team at the forefront of digital research and innovation, designing and developing world-leading platforms that enable cutting-edge environmental science. Working at the intersection of research and engineering, you'll help build and operate critical national research infrastructure that supports groundbreaking scientific discovery, informs policy, and delivers lasting impact for society.

You will join the Digital Engineering Group within the National Capability and Digital Research science area at UKCEH Lancaster, contributing to the development of cloud-based systems that support (DRI), including national capability projects and programmes such as the — one of the UK's five national environmental data centres, hosting over 26,000 datasets — and . These are long-lived systems that hold irreplaceable environmental data.

You will help build and operate platform-agnostic systems within a hybrid cloud environment, applying cloud-native principles to keep these systems reliable, scalable, and robust, while improving integration and interoperability across diverse systems, data sources, and heterogeneous datasets contributing to the wider digital vision of the environmental science community.

You'll join a growing multidisciplinary team developing sustainable software that supports environmental science and collaboration across UKCEH and its partners. Working closely with researchers and technical specialists, you'll create digital tools and infrastructure that drive scientific discovery and inform environmental policy. This hands-on software engineering role involves designing, building, testing, and maintaining innovative solutions, including research cloud infrastructure, data lakes, digital twins, and collaborative research platforms. You'll be part of a team at the forefront of digital research and innovation, helping to deliver world-leading environmental science through critical national research infrastructure that creates real-world impact.

Your main responsibilities will include:

• Build and operate services: Design, build, test, review and deploy software services and data pipelines
• Own your work: Take ownership of specific components or project tasks end to end
• Work with modern infrastructure: Containers, CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code
• Apply FAIR principles: (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) to software, data and metadata you produce
• Contribute to open source: Including the licensing, documentation and packaging that make releases usable by others
• Co-Design with users: Understanding what they actually need, showing them early work and iterate based on feedback
• Communicate clearly: Explain technical choices and trade-offs clearly to people who are not software engineers, in writing and in conversation
• Take part in planning, estimation and retrospectives, and helping the team improve how it delivers

For the role of Software Engineer, we’re looking for somebody who:

• Has a good degree in an appropriate subject, or significant experience of working in a Software Engineering environment.
• Solid, practical experience writing production software in at least one general-purpose language (Python is desirable, as it matches our current stack, but we welcome strong candidates from other languages).
• Good software engineering practices: version control and branching (Git), automated testing, code review, debugging systems you did not write, and working with SQL and/or NoSQL data stores.
• Working knowledge of cloud and containers: comfortable deploying to at least one cloud platform (Azure, AWS or GCP) and working with Docker or similar, with an understanding of CI/CD.
• Clear communication and collaboration: able to work with non-specialists, write documentation and take and give feedback
• An appetite to learn. Our stack and the wider landscape both move; we need people who stay curious.