Main Purpose of the Job

The Earlham Institute is seeking a versatile full-stack Research Software Engineer (RSE) to join the team behind COPO (Collaborative OPen Omics), a production-deployed metadata and data-brokering platform that has been developed and operated at the Institute since 2015.

COPO underpins some of the largest biodiversity genomics programmes attempted to date, having brokered more than 80,000 samples from over 4,800 species to public repositories such as the European Nucleotide Archive, with automated validation, expert curation and full audit trails.

The successful candidate will join the small engineering team that builds and operates COPO, contributing across the full stack — frontend interfaces, APIs, and the services that connect them to the platform's validation, curation and submission pipelines. Data visualisation, dashboards and API design will be at the centre of the role, but the post is deliberately broad: COPO supports a range of research communities and projects, and the work varies with the needs of those the platform serves.

This is a broadly scoped full-stack role with metadata validation, translation, visualisation and API design as its primary focus. It suits an engineer who enjoys turning complex scientific data into clear, reliable, well-documented interfaces that researchers and the wider community can depend on. Being a senior, hands-on role, you will own significant components of the project end to end, make day-to-day architectural decisions, and drive delivery to time.

Key Relationships

Internal: COPO Team Lead / Group Leader (direction, prioritisation, line management); the COPO development team of fellow engineers and frontend developers (collaboration, code review, and mentoring); EI bioinformaticians and research scientists (scientific and metadata requirements); Scientific Computing / IT infrastructure teams (compute, storage and platform services); and project managers / programme coordinators (planning, reporting and effort estimates).

External: genomics and biodiversity programmes and projects that COPO supports; EMBL-EBI / ELIXIR services such as ENA and BioSamples; other public repositories and registries such as Zenodo and DataCite; metadata-standards communities including RO-Crate, ISA, MIxS, Darwin Core and Bioschemas; and the wider open-source community and downstream COPO users.

Main Activities & Responsibilities

Dashboards, data visualisation and data portals
• Design, build and maintain interactive dashboards and public data portals, from data model through to production deployment.
• Translate complex, multi-source scientific metadata into clear, accurate and accessible visualisations.
• Build reporting and summary views that are reproducible and auditable, including snapshots for governance and reporting.
• Apply good practice in accessibility, responsive design and information design so that outputs are usable by researchers and the public alike.

APIs and backend services
• Develop, document and maintain RESTful APIs that expose metadata in multiple formats for internal tools and external consumers.
Integrate frontend and portal services with COPO's validation, curation and submission pipelines.
• Ensure APIs are performant, versioned, secure and well documented so third parties can build against them with minimal support.

Full-stack engineering and platform contribution
• Contribute across the COPO codebase: frontend, backend and supporting services as a flexible member of a small engineering team.
• Write clean, tested, maintainable code with appropriate use of version control, code review, CI/CD and containerisation (Git, Docker).
• Help deploy and operate COPO instances, working with colleagues on deployment, monitoring, backup and reliability.

Collaboration, standards and support
• Work closely with the technical lead and engineering colleagues to extend the platform and its metadata standards.
• Help add support for new data types and metadata schemas, and reflect these in the interfaces and APIs you build.
• Support research users onboarding onto the platform, including documentation, tutorials and responsive help.
• Produce clear technical documentation and contribute to open-source releases under permissive licences.

As agreed with line manager, any other duties commensurate with the nature of the role.

Education & Qualifications

Requirement

Importance

Degree (or equivalent professional/practical experience) in computer science, software engineering, bioinformatics or a related discipline

Essential

Specialist Knowledge & Skills

Requirement

Importance

Proficiency with version control (Git) and collaborative development workflows, including code review

Essential

Understanding of FAIR data principles, ontologies or controlled vocabularies

Essential

An understanding of, and willingness to apply, good engineering practice: automated testing, clear documentation and basic security awareness

Essential

Able to translate complex requirements into clear, usable interfaces, with strong attention to accuracy and detail

Essential

Familiarity with cloud or research-computing infrastructure

Desirable

Exposure to genomics, biodiversity, ecology or a related life-science domain

Desirable

Relevant Experience

Requirement

Importance

Demonstrable experience building and maintaining full-stack web applications in JavaScript and a backend language (Python preferred)

Essential

Experience designing, building and documenting RESTful APIs

Essential

Experience with containerisation and deployment (Docker; CI/CD pipelines)

Essential

Experience designing and building data visualisations or dashboards, using libraries such as Plotly, D3, or equivalent

Desirable

Experience working with structured or scientific data, metadata standards, or data-intensive systems

Desirable

Management and Leadership

Requirement

Importance

Experience mentoring, coaching or line-managing other developers

Essential

Interpersonal & Communication Skills

Requirement

Importance

Committed to open, reproducible and well-tested software

Essential

Able to work both independently and as a flexible, collaborative member of a small team

Essential

Good written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear technical documentation and explain technical matters to non-specialists

Essential

Comfortable working with, and responsive to, a distributed community of research users

Essential

Able to work independently, use initiative and apply problem solving skills

Essential

Additional Requirements

Requirement

Importance

Promotes equality and values diversity

Essential

Attention to detail

Essential

Willingness to embrace the expected values and behaviours of all staff at the Institute, ensuring it is a great place to work

Essential

Able to present a positive image of self and the Institute, promoting both the international reputation and public engagement aims of the Institute

Essential

Willingness to work outside standard working hours when required

Essential

Ability to maintain confidentiality and security of information where appropriate

Essential

Earlham Institute

About the Earlham Institute
The Earlham Institute harnesses the power of data-driven biology to accelerate solutions for health, biodiversity, and food security. Based at Norwich Research Park, the Earlham Institute is one of eight institutes strategically funded by BBSRC.

Our science combines world-class technology, interdisciplinary expertise, and training and development across genomics, engineering biology and data science, to decode the scale and complexity of living systems.

We believe we can achieve more if we work together. That's why we collaborate with the global science community and industry partners, while also inspiring the next generation of scientists and technical specialists.

Our Science
Earlham Institute scientists specialise in developing and testing the latest tools and approaches needed to decode living systems and make biological predictions.

We are home to state-of-the-art facilities and technology, creating a unique combination of expertise and infrastructure.

We have dedicated laboratories for genome sequencing, single-cell analysis, engineering biology, and large-scale automation; as well as one of the largest supercomputing facilities for life science research in Europe.

Our Advanced Training team also provides access to specialised scientific training to upskill the next generation of research and technical staff.

Our Culture
Our collegiate and innovative research environment comes with significant support, including a commitment to your professional development, research and administrative assistance, and opportunities to build collaborations with scientists and industry on the Norwich Research Park, across the UK, and internationally.

We are committed to building and maintaining a workplace that treats every individual with dignity and respect. By taking an active approach to fostering inclusivity, diversity, equality and accessibility, we empower our community to achieve more.

The Institute is also home to talented technical and operational staff, whose invaluable contributions enable our science to have the maximum impact. We aim to recognise, reward, and develop all staff and students so that every individual feels able to achieve their best with us.

We work hard to nurture an engaged and positive workplace, centred on core values that include openness, technical excellence, and collaboration. We attract staff from around the world who contribute to - and benefit from - an environment that enables them to deliver world-class science alongside a supportive and social community.

For more information about working at the Earlham Institute, please click here.

Further Information:

• Our Vision and Mission
• Our Strategy
• Our Culture
• Life at Earlham Institute

Department

Research Faculty

Group Details

COPO (Collaborative OPen Omics) is an open-source (MIT-licensed) metadata brokering platform that helps researchers describe, validate and deposit their data to public repositories such as the European Nucleotide Archive, the BioImage Archive and Zenodo. It enforces community-defined metadata standards through configurable manifests, covering standards such as MIxS, Darwin Core, Tree of Life, FAANG and REMBI, catching taxonomy, unit and identifier errors programmatically and generating FAIR-compliant outputs.
The platform combines automated validation, expert human curation, automated repository submission and real-time APIs in a single system and has supported hundreds of users across large genomics efforts. It is built with open-source tooling and deployed on Earlham Institute research cloud infrastructure. COPO is actively developed, and the team is regularly asked to extend it with new interfaces, dashboards, data types and integrations.
 

Living in Norfolk

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Senior Developer

Applications are invited for a Senior Developer to join the Research Faculty at the Earlham Institute, based in Norwich, UK.

Background:

Help build the platform behind some of the largest biodiversity genomics programmes ever attempted.

COPO (Collaborative OPen Omics) is a Django-based metadata brokering platform developed at the Earlham Institute. It helps researchers describe, manage and publish biological data in line with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). COPO captures standards-compliant metadata and brokers submissions to public repositories including the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), BioSamples, Zenodo and DataCite, and packages research outputs as RO-Crates.

COPO is the metadata backbone for projects of international scientific significance, including the Darwin Tree of Life programme and Biodiversity Genomics Europe, supporting the description and submission of samples, sequencing data and derived analyses from biodiversity genomics at scale.

The role:

We are seeking a talented Senior Developer to deliver the next phase of COPO's evolution.

The work will evolve COPO's existing Python/Django codebase, establishing a cleaner, more maintainable architecture with improved APIs and user-facing components. You will enhance the platform's ability to support new use cases and integrations while preserving the metadata handling excellence that makes COPO invaluable to the research community.

Working across the full technology stack, you will develop dashboards, data portals, APIs and the services that support COPO's metadata validation, curation and submission workflows. Data visualisation and API design sit at the heart of the role, transforming complex, multi-source scientific metadata into clear, reliable and well-documented interfaces that researchers can depend on.

Ideal candidate:

The ideal candidate will have a degree (or equivalent professional/practical experience) in computer science, software engineering, bioinformatics or a related discipline.

You will have experience delivering full-stack web applications using modern frontend and backend technologies, with a strong track record in designing, building and documenting RESTful APIs. Comfortable working in collaborative engineering environments, you will be confident with version control, code review practices, containerisation and CI/CD workflows.

The post holder will have a talent for turning complex or ambiguous requirements into intuitive, user-focused solutions, and an appreciation of FAIR data principles, ontologies or controlled vocabularies.

Experience with data visualisation and dashboard development, scientific data or metadata standards, cloud or research-computing environments, or domains such as genomics, biodiversity or ecology would be advantageous.


Additional information:

Salary on appointment will be within the range £47,450 to £58,000 per annum depending on qualifications and experience. This is a full-time post for a contract until 31 August 2028.

This role does not meet the full salary requirements set by UKVI to allow for visa sponsorship. However, some individuals may still be eligible for visa sponsorship depending on their personal circumstances. If you require visa sponsorship, please click here to find out if you qualify before applying. Please note, the occupation code for this role is 2134, which is not on the immigration salary list.

As a Disability Confident employer, we guarantee to offer an interview to all disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for this vacancy.

The closing date for applications will be 5 August 2026.