usrse / rse-roles

A community database of shared job descriptions, and other relevant metadata about RSE roles (under development)

RSE Roles

What is the definition of an RSE? I can't tell you, but I can show you.

What is RSE Roles?

It's a hard task to define a research software engineer, as the role can emcompass a wide set of skill sets and tasks. Since we don't have a good way to derive a single definition that everyone can agree on, by collecting example job descriptions for what an RSE does, we can start to understand the what skills and responsibilities are commonly associated with being an RSE. In the future you could imagine doing a small similarity analysis to compare descriptions, or an assessment of which skills are most saught for, and which are more rare. For now, it's just a collection of descriptions, and you can continue reading to learn how to add your description.

How do I add a job description?

The job descriptions are rendered out of _posts, and having them as posts is done intentionally so there is a date associated with the description. Adding a job description comes down to creating a new file in this folder, and writing up the description. Sections that are recommended (but not required) include:

• Job Description: an overview of the job
• Responsibilities: a list of the main responsibilities assocated with the role
• Essential Qualifications: what you think are absolutely necessary.
• Preferred Qualifications: "Would be nice, but not essential."
• Education: the minimum education that you think is required

It's important to remember that the language that we use can be biased to select for different groups, or even the choices we make in the description. You should make sure that your description does not have gender or other kinds of bias. Once you've written your post, you can submit a pull request to this repository to have it reviewed, approvied, and merged.

What would we like to do in the future?

The following would be great!

• Adding resources to ensure non-biased posts
• Analysis to compare similarity of different parts of posts (and entire)
• Analysis to extract common (and uncommon) features of descriptions

If you have any questions or would like to contribute, either via a job description or work on the site, please open an issue!

rse-roles's Issues

Adding category/metadata to each role

(moved from comment in review of #2)

It would be really good to have some high level information about each role captured somewhere. I think about who is going to use this and think that it would be desirable to have the following captured for each JD (ideally in a searchable fashion):

• Formal Job title
• Organization
• Organization type
• Department
• Category
• Full time/part time
• Domain

So for example:

• Research Software Engineer, Senior RSE, Scientific Programmer, Computer Scientist
• Princeton University, ORNL,
• University, National Lab, Industry
• Research Computing, Molecular Biology, Computer Science,
• IT, Research
• Full time
• Molecular Biology, Economics, HPC, etc

If this gets to be a big enough database having the ability to sift through different roles based on keywords in these categories would be great.

I think this could all be added later.

Site needs CI preview on Circle

Overlap with Evidence Bank?

Hi 👋,

I just came across this resource and found it interesting. It looks like most of the job descriptions are US focused. Is it the intention to be a purely US focused resource?

If not, perhaps some of the information from the RSE leaders evidence bank might be useful (although it is less up to date).

In my opinion, it might be better to maintain a single shared resource with this sort of information.

Kind regards,
Carlos