Research Associate Programmer in EGENES

About The Team:

This group is pivotal in aiding land-based sectors both domestically and internationally to enhance food security while minimizing the environmental impact of food and farming amidst a changing climate. They excel in areas such as animal breeding, health, and welfare, and will collaborate extensively on livestock systems research with the new Future Farming Systems group.

The group's research encompasses both desk-based and experimental studies in:

• Animal breeding and genomics
• Animal behaviour and welfare
• Disease systems
• Avian sciences

Additionally, the group will engage closely with other researchers involved in both systems and component-level research within and outside SRUC.

The Opportunity:

This is an opportunity to learn skills and gain experience of programming in a big data environment. If you like data, read on.

We work with tens of millions of animal records, pedigrees with over 80 million animals, data files with hundreds of millions of events, and spectral data containing over 43 billion rows. The programming strategy required varies according to the task, and the job is to use the appropriate tool and computing tactic to solve the problem in a timely fashion. The successful candidate will work within an integrated group of around 15 comprising programmers and geneticists, 9 of which work within EGENES. Our work is very high pressure, time-dependent with tight deadlines but varied and interesting, ranging from routine evaluations through to researching new phenotypes predicted from milk mid-infra-red spectral (MIR) and developed with Deep Learning. For instance, recently, we succeeded in the use of milk mid-infra-red spectral data for Bovine tuberculosis prediction at the industry level and are currently going through field trials. We are looking to implement similar strategies for other complex traits such as feed intake.

We investigate hardware acceleration of compute-intensive processes on GPUs and FPGAs and are constantly investigating new and better ways of doing things. We use an NVIDIA DGX station with 4 GPUs with 20,000 cores that processes 43 billion spectral data points. Every day is different in EGENES, and the team is highly focused on delivering on time every time, providing a very supportive and team-based work environment.

We are seeking an enthusiastic junior technical programmer who can take a major supporting role in EGENES, working closely with the programming team and the geneticists (Professor Raph Mrode, Dr Samir Id Lahoucine, Professor Mike Coffey) to deliver, efficiently and consistently, genetic evaluations of the highest quality. The right approach and attitude are considered key skills, and this post is ideally suited to a recent graduate keen to develop skills in large data handling. It is expected that the candidate will undertake programming and systems engineering to develop or support genetic evaluation methodologies, including creating and maintaining databases, imputation strategies with very large datasets, programming strategies to minimise time to delivery, updating/improving existing code and/or strategies, and developing emergency data storage and retrieval plans. It will be expected that the candidate should be (or capable of learning quickly) versatile in several programming and scripting languages. We work with dairy and beef cattle, sheep, dairy goats, and pigs.

The role requires good communication skills as there will be regular client contact for development and testing purposes to ensure the evaluations meet their specifications.

Minimum Qualifications and Skills:

The successful candidate will be educated to SCQF Level 10 in a subject such as Computer Science.

Required Skills:

• A qualification in computing science OR sufficient experience
• Excellent numerical and statistical powers
• Programming experience and the ability to learn new languages
• Good communication ability
• Good analytical/problem-solving skills
• Excellent team player skills
• Attention to detail

Desirable Skills:

• SQL Server experience
• FORTRAN
• Powershell and batch Scripting
• Knowledge of Containers technology (Docker)
• Linux cluster and SLURM cluster management and job scheduling
• Large data handling experience
• Knowledge of computer security programs
• Genetic evaluation experience

Eligibility for Sponsorship:

For the purposes of sponsorship, this role may be eligible for sponsorship depending on candidate circumstances.

Why work for SRUC?

• Generous annual leave
• Enhanced pension contributions (5% employee and 10% employer)
• Cycle to work scheme
• Discounted RAC Membership
• Generous family leave
• Flexible working patterns
• Hybrid working solutions (in some areas)
• Tailored investment in individuals' learning and development

How to Apply:

Please complete an online application form by clicking ‘Apply'.

Please read the Job Particulars document before applying.

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