Through demand, not lobbying- the emergence of an RSE career path

Posted by US Research Software Sustainability Institute on September 17, 2018 · 1 min read

This is a crosspost from URSSI Blog on Official Website of the US Research Software Sustaiability Institute, Recent content in URSSI Blog on Official Website of the US Research Software Sustaiability Institute. See the original post here.

When I first started thinking about how we could create a career path for Research Software Engineers (RSEs) in academia, I assumed it would involve persuading university managers to implement a new career path. Quite frankly, I wasn’t looking forward to the interminable bureaucracy that such a change would require me to navigate. Fortunately, a completely different solution quickly gained traction in the UK: the rise of RSE Groups. An RSE Group is a centralized group, based at a university or other research organization, that employs a number of RSEs and then hires them out to researchers across the organization.