Research Software Engineer

This position is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Professional Research Experience Program (PREP). NIST recognizes that its research staff may want to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest and, therefore, requires those institutions to be recipients of a PREP award. The PREP program involves staff from a wide range of backgrounds conducting scientific research across various fields. Individuals in this position will perform technical work supporting the collaboration's scientific research.

The work will entail

The Data Center and Business Group (DCB) in the NIST Material Measurement Laboratory is seeking a Research Software Engineer (RSE) to help build sustainable software infrastructure for Measurement Service related projects. The successful candidate will provide both hands-on support for the development, maintenance, deployment, and long-term sustainability of critical software, databases, workflows, and scientific infrastructure.

In this role you will work as an embedded technical team member, participating in project planning, code creation and revision, code review, architecture discussions, reproducibility efforts, and deployment decisions. The successful candidate will help prioritize coding work across projects in consultation with DCB programmers, balancing near-term needs with long-term software sustainability.

Duties

• Design, expand, and deploy to an existing scientific database layout supporting active research and internal NIST datasets.
• Develop, refactor, profile, test, and package prototype code for long-term maintainability and performance.
• Develop new user-friendly intuitive features based around data input forms and display of data for an existing reference material dataset website.
• Develop features to store, retrieve, and manage files related to the data records.

Required Skills, Expertise, and Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree in software engineering, computer science, information technology, a STEM field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Proficiency in Server-side languages or runtimes (Node.js and PHP), alongside database management (MongoDB).
• Proficiency in version control systems like Git, API integration, responsive design, and debugging/testing procedures.
• Proficiency in Linux based file system and programming.
• Experience building data pipelines and reproducible workflows.
• Library and API design and release management, documentation for scientific users and developers, automated testing and continuous integration, code review and maintainability practices.
• The ability to work alongside researchers in adopting modern, collaborative software development workflows (e.g., git-based collaboration, issue tracking, lightweight project management).
• Experience creating tutorials, examples, API documentation, or other user-facing materials for scientific software.

An Associate at NIST is not a federal employee but collaborates with NIST on research projects of mutual interest and does not work exclusively on NIST mission-related activities. If you have any questions, please contact the International and Academic Affairs Office at View email address on click.appcast.io .