Research Software Engineer Durham University

Durham University - Physics

£30,122 to £35,938 per annum

A vacancy exists at the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation (CfAI) for a Research Software Engineer to join a team that is developing hardware and both high and low level software for the control of instrumentation for astronomical adaptive optics.

The CfAI is a major research groups in the Physics department at Durham University, designing instrumentation primarily but not exclusively for ground and space astronomical applications for the world's major observatories, including ESO's E-ELT and VLT, JWST and SALT. CfAI is acknowledged as a world- leading centre for expertise in adaptive optics. The Research Software Engineer will be responsible to the Head of Computing within CfAI. He/she will be expected to contribute to a research program in software techniques for the control of astronomical instrumentation with emphasis on real-time systems for adaptive optics. He/she will explore the development of algorithms for adaptive optics and their implementation in acceleration hardware such as FPGA and GPU, using the latest software and firmware development tools and will be a member of our CANARY team - an international collaboration aimed at demonstrating new adaptive optics techniques for the European Extremely Large Telescope.

Applicants should have a good honours degree and substantial experience in structured computer programming. Some knowledge of the following is desirable: adaptive optics; experience with programming FPGAs in HDL and GPUs using CUDA; C, C++ and Python languages.

Further details of the post and an application form are available on our website (http://www.dur.ac.uk/jobs/) or telephone 0191 334 6499; fax 0191 334 6495

Closing date: 10 February 2012.

Vacancy 1386.