Position Details

IT Services

Location: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK

Full time starting salary is normally in the range £46,485 to £55,295 with potential progression once in post to £62,098

Grade: 8

Full Time, Fixed Term contract up to July 2028

Closing date: 12th January 2025

Our offer to you

People are at the heart of what we are and do.

The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success.

We are committed to helping the people who work here to develop through our sector-leading Birmingham Professional programme which provides all professional services staff with development opportunities and the encouragement to reach their full potential. With almost 5,000 professional services jobs in a wide-range of functions in Edgbaston and in our campus in Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities for you to be able to develop your career at the University.

We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work.

Supporting our people to achieve a healthy work/life balance is important both to our employees and to the success of the University and, depending on the role, we offer a variety of flexible working arrangements. We therefore welcome discussions on all forms of flexible working. In addition, you will receive a generous package of benefits including 40 days paid holiday a year, one paid day a year for volunteering, occupational sick pay, and a pension scheme. We also have three high quality subsidised day nurseries.

The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum and botanical gardens.

Find out more about the benefits of working for the University of Birmingham

Background

Over the next decade, our aspiration is to establish Birmingham in the top 50 of the world's leading universities. That's a pretty big aspiration, and high-quality digital services and infrastructure are crucial to achieving it. In recognition of that, our Digital Strategy combined with significant investments in technology mean this is an exciting time to join IT Services, ‘making IT happen’ at the University of Birmingham.

We want to attract outstanding, inspirational, and talented people, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success. It's our role to ensure that our community has access to accessible, responsive, resilient, and secure systems and support. What we do enables our students, staff, researchers, visitors and partners to confidently and creatively use digital services, technology and data for the benefit of their learning, teaching, research or work. 

The culture of IT Services is one of innovation, collaboration, excellence, and inclusivity, and we apply the principles of customer focus and continuous improvement to everything we do. We have an active People and Culture network, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Women in IT group, bi-annual making IT happen awards recognition programme, and a superb Social Committee which arranges regular activities and events.

The Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science and AI (IIDSAI) is a nexus for collaborative research and education at the University of Birmingham. Working across all five Colleges, the Institute is developing and fostering a culture of continuous interaction to address important challenges in areas including sustainability, equality, health, and data-driven science. We are building on a foundation of excellence in methodology including modelling, statistics, machine learning, linguistics, optimisation, behavioural sciences, and the social, ethical, and legal implications of technology.

Advanced Research Computing (ARC) builds and runs a range of specialist services for researchers, collectively known as BEAR (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research). Serving all disciplines, BEAR covers an increasingly broad spectrum of needs, ranging from the traditional HPC through data storage and archiving requirements to tools for collaboration and analytics as well as offering ‘on premises’ cloud and web-based data science tools. ARC also supports Birmingham’s researchers in using specialist regional and national services, including HPC Midlands Plus and the Birmingham-based Baskerville Tier 2 AI supercomputer funded by EPSRC. Together with the national supercomputer ARCHER 2 (Tier 1) and Birmingham’s own BEAR infrastructure, they form a powerful resource for research.

Role Summary

The post holder will join a strong and dynamic group of Research Data Scientists, Research Software Engineers, Research Applications Specialists and DevOps Engineers with a particular focus on supporting researchers. While this post is funded by and its priorities set by the IIDSAI, the post holder will be operationally based (and line managed) in the Research Software Group (RSG) in ARC.

This role is primarily technical, however a minority of the post holder’s time will be spent line managing a small team of other Research Data Scientists in collaboration with the Research Software Group (RSG) Leader. In addition to the relevant managerial training courses available, the RSG Leader will be available to mentor, guide and advise the post holder in the line management aspects of this role.

The Senior Research Data Scientist and Manager will collaborate closely with researchers from many different academic disciplines and will provide expert knowledge and skills to analyse, visualise, explore, and extract knowledge from all kinds of research data. They will provide training in their areas of expertise as well as promote the associated best practices. The post holder is not expected to start with a full set of skills but should have a good base of experience and strong skills in some areas and a commitment to learn and build on them, staying up-to-date with the latest advances in a fast-moving field.

Main Duties

• In conjunction with the Research Software Group Leader: Oversee a technical Research Data Science service, available to all members of academic staff and researchers throughout the University; Develop and maintain a programme of work and a system for allocating the finite development resource effectively. 
• Reporting to the Research Software Group Leader, line manage a small team of other Research Data Scientists.
• Take responsibility and work collaboratively with research groups from across the University on the definition, documentation, development and satisfactory completion of collaborative data science projects: defining requirements; devising solutions; agreeing timescales and priorities as well as identifying the risks to be managed. Each of these engagements will be unique in nature and complexity and range from a few days to many months' duration.
• Disseminate good practices in the areas of data science, AI, data engineering, data visualisation etc. – leading to new insights in to research problems.
• As part of the broader RSG, provide Advice, Support, Coaching, and Data Science, Analytics, Engineering or Coding services; crucially always with the aim of ownership and responsibility remaining with the research group. In this busy environment, prioritisation, and communication are key to manage expectations.
• Build and maintain relationships with research communities within the University and beyond, seeking opportunities to actively contribute to research or funding bids. This will mean defining the scope of work and the associated costs for data science support for the grant applications as well as the associated IT infrastructure and support costs. 
• Contribute to research papers to be published in academic literature and produce case studies.
• Contribute to raising awareness of the IIDSAI and ARC/BEAR’s services for researchers and the profile of the IIDSAI and ARC. Help build active user communities locally and regionally, by contributing to seminars and networking events, encouraging the adoption of best practice, sharing knowledge and expertise. 
• Deliver training courses, devising content where applicable or, where qualified, delivering externally validated material, e.g. Data Carpentries. Content will vary from introductory to specialized and advanced levels.
• Liaise and engage with external professional networks within the data science and software engineering sectors, such as national RSE networks, the Alan Turing Institute and the Software Sustainability Institute, to keep informed of the latest developments and sector initiatives.
• Identify opportunities for service improvement, such as introducing new data science tools or techniques to existing services, and propose and develop innovative solutions to enrich the user experience, to enhance service delivery, and reduce costs or environmental impacts.
• Maintain an awareness of technical developments, tools and ideas in data science and in software engineering, including attending seminars, technical briefings, conferences and technical groups.
• In addition to University provided training and development, you will undertake sufficient personal and professional development , ensuring skills and knowledge are up to date so that the role is performed to the required level.
• Actively manages equality, diversity and inclusion through monitoring and evaluation and actively challenging unacceptable behaviour. 
• Supports the University’s sustainability agenda through resource efficient working. 
• Any other duties commensurate with the role and grade.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Qualifications, Experience

• Educated to degree level or equivalent qualification, preferably in a subject with a strong software development component, plus substantial work experience in a relevant technical/scientific and/or management/supervisory role in a specialist area. A higher degree may also be held. Where no equivalent qualification is held a proven track record of extensive and substantial work experience in a series of progressively more demanding and relevant roles will be required.
• Proven technical specialist knowledge and understanding in a relevant technical area (specialists will require advanced technical expertise).
• Relevant experience carrying out or supporting data science, data engineering or informatics projects, preferably in a research environment.
• Experience supporting researchers with complex requirements is desirable.
• Broad and deep knowledge of data science or data engineering processes, tools and techniques.
• Broad and deep knowledge of database technologies or data management would be an advantage.
• Broad and deep knowledge of data visualisation processes, tools and techniques would be an advantage.
• Broad and deep knowledge of programming and programming languages commonly used by data scientists – including at least one of Python, R and C++.
• Experience with version control in git (using GitHub or GitLab is desirable).
• Experience with unit testing and continuous integration is desirable.
• Experience as a researcher is desirable.
• Good knowledge of computational statistics is desirable.
• Good customer relationship management skills.
• Proven ability to work as part of a team to deliver services.
• A self-motivated learner with a track record of continually updating skills – each new project is likely to require learning something new.
• Excellent organizational/project management skills.
• Good communication skills.
• Evidence of literacy and numeracy.
• Good broad knowledge of C&IT, including latest technology industry trends.
• Knowledge of Higher Education, Research and its environment.
• Experience of championing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in own work area. 
• Ability to monitor and evaluate the extent to which equality and diversity legislation, policies, procedures are applied. 
• Ability to identify issues with the potential to impact on protected groups and take appropriate action.

Informal enquiries to Andrew Edmondson, email: a.c.edmondson@bham.ac.uk 

View our staff values and behaviours here 

We believe there is no such thing as a 'typical' member of University of Birmingham staff and that diversity in its many forms is a strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation and debate at the heart of University life. We are committed to proactively addressing the barriers experienced by some groups in our community and are proud to hold Athena SWAN, Race Equality Charter and Disability Confident accreditations. We have an Equality Diversity and Inclusion Centre that focuses on continuously improving the University as a fair and inclusive place to work where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We are also committed to sustainability, which is a key part of our strategy. You can find out more about our work to create a fairer university for everyone on our website.