Research Infrastructure Engineer

The Extreme Photonics Innovation Centre (EPIC) is a joint UK-India innovation initiative aimed at developing technology for next-generation accelerators using lasers. Funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), this £5.5 million centre is jointly established between UK's Central Laser Facility (CLF) and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). The CLF at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), is a world-leader in the next- generation laser technology that can drive compact accelerators yielding bright particle and x-ray beams that, in the near future, can transform imaging capabilities in industry and medicine. TIFR has been pursuing the intense laser science over the past two decades and has unraveled many unique features in this field.

Job Description

Scientists at X-ray, neutron and laser facilities now generate data faster than they can analyse it. We are building the platform that closes that gap: a portal that lets them run large-scale scientific workflows across cloud and HPC without having to become infrastructure experts.

You will help design the core architecture, from workflow orchestration and federated identity through to AI-assisted workflow generation. The system is early. The decisions made now will shape it for years.

Essential

• Strong backend engineering in Python, Go or Node.js, on systems that ran in production.
• Distributed systems experience: async pipelines, message queues, object storage, databases.
• Hands-on with containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code (Terraform or Pulumi), CI/CD and a major cloud platform.

Valuable

• Workflow orchestration tools such as Argo, Nextflow, Airflow, Snakemake or Kubeflow. Slurm or other HPC scheduling is a plus.
• Federated identity: OIDC, OAuth2 or SAML.
• Integrating LLMs and AI tooling into production applications, past the prototype stage.

Nice to have

• React or Next.js, observability, security practice, scientific Python, open-source contributions.

We want engineers who enjoy building from the ground up, owning architectural decisions, and putting solid infrastructure in the hands of working scientists.