Research Software Engineer - Department of Applied Health Sciences Grade 7

Position Details

Department of Applied Health Sciences, School of Health Sciences, College of Medicine and Health

Location:

University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK

Full time starting salary is normally in the range £36,636 to £46,049 with potential progression once in post to £48,822

Grade: 7

Full Time, Fixed Term contract up to February 2029

Closing date: 18th March 2026

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.

We are seeking a highly motivated Research Software Engineer with strong expertise in statistical computing, data science, or a related quantitative field to support our research team in the Department of Applied Health Sciences. The successful candidate will contribute to a Gates Foundation funded project focused on developing and applying advanced spatial and spatio‑temporal statistical methods to inform disease mapping and control strategies in low‑resource settings.

The project offers a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of statistical methodology, epidemiology, and global health, within a vibrant international network coordinated by the newly established Geostatistics for Population Health research group at the University of Birmingham. The research will involve developing new geostatistical approaches to integrate multi‑country disease surveillance data and generate policy‑relevant outputs.

The post holder will work under the guidance of Prof. Emanuele Giorgi and Dr. Claudio Fronterre, contributing to the development, implementation, and optimisation of research software and analytical tools supporting methodological innovation and applied disease mapping. The role will involve close collaboration with the NTD Modelling Consortium (University of Oxford), the Task Force for Global Health, and other international partners across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The post holder will support the design, optimisation, and maintenance of open‑source R packages, data pipelines, and reproducible analytical workflows, supporting large‑scale data analysis, dissemination, and long‑term sustainability of project software outputs.

We welcome and…