Research Software Engineer, Universal Viewer Product Team

Description

We are looking for a Digital Humanities Research Software Engineer (DH RSE) to become part of a new product team that will focus on Universal Viewer at the British Library. Universal Viewer is a community-developed open source project on a mission to help us share our content with the world.

This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to the development and implementation of our digital scholarship and public outreach activities. Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team, the successful candidate will help identify requirements, and design and implement online interfaces to showcase our collections, help answer research questions, and support application of novel methods across team activities. The DH RSE will create outputs and interfaces for digitised collections, crowdsourcing and annotation tasks, for subject matter specialists, academic, and public users. See our Research Reports and blog for examples of the different type of past activities we have been involved in. 

The post holder will have a good understanding of digital scholarship, preferably gained from working in a research library, academic or other appropriate environment. This may include work as a Research Software Engineer, software developer, creative technologist, data or visualisation specialist, or digital humanities researcher. They will have excellent information technology skills, including experience of the tools and technologies that support digital scholarship. Excellent oral and written communication skills are also essential for this post. As with other Research Software Engineer roles, the post holder will have the opportunity to develop their skills and play an active part in all aspects of research and outreach, including publications.

We welcome and encourage job applications from people of all backgrounds. We particularly welcome applications from disabled, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) candidates as these are currently under-represented throughout the British Library at this level.

As one of the world’s great libraries, our duty is to preserve the nation’s intellectual memory for the future and make it available to all for research, inspiration and enjoyment. At present we have well over 170 million items, in most known languages, with three million new items added every year. We have manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, prints and drawings, music scores, and patents. We make our collections and programmes available to all. We operate the world’s largest document delivery service providing millions of items a year to customers all over the world. What matters to us is that we preserve the national memory and enable knowledge to be created both now and in the future by anyone, anywhere.

In return we offer a competitive salary and a number of excellent benefits.  Our pension scheme is one of the most valuable benefits we offer, as our staff can become members of the Alpha Pension Scheme where the Library contributes a minimum of 26.6% (this may be higher dependant on grade. Another significant benefit the Library provides is the provision of a flexible working hours scheme which could allow you to work your hours flexibly over the week and to take up to 5 days flexi leave in a 3 month period. This is on top of 25 days holiday from entry and public and privilege holidays.