Research Software Engineering (RSE)
The Research Software Engineering (RSE) service within Research Computing offers specialist software development consultancy, code development expertise and access to tools, platforms and training to research projects at the University of Leeds.
Our Service
We are a diverse team of Research Software Engineers with a broad skill set from database solutions, grid and parallel computing to data science and AI. We have extensive experience of high performance computing and have supported research across the entire University. You can meet members of the team via the Team page.
We can contribute impact at every stage of your project from the earliest stages of grant preparation, through to code development and preparing code for publication. We help researchers ensure their projects meet the stringent funder requirements for research reproducibility and software longevity.
We deliver maintainable, reliant and scalable solutions that can be designed for any specific fixed term engagement. We can offer consultancy services from the short-term to long-term, part- or full-time, and can be costed into grant applications or charged at a daily rate.
We design and deliver teaching and training - researchers can attend our open access training or we can work with your group to design something bespoke. Members of our team are qualified and experienced teachers and trainers.
Areas that we work in include:
- Software Development
- Software Sustainability
- Software Testing
- High Performance Computing
- Machine Learning and Deep Learning
- Scientific and Parallel Computing
- Computational Mechanics
- Data Science
- Digital Humanities
- Web and Web Application design and development
- Cloud and IoT (Internet of Things)
- Workflows and Pipelines
We’re constantly developing new skills, integrating new colleagues and learning about new technologies so please get in touch if you are unsure if we can work together.
Case studies
You can read through some examples of consulting work the Research Computing Team have been part of at our Case studies blog.
How to use the RSE service
General advice, guidance and grant consultancy is always free; as is our training.
We appreciate that proofs of concept and other pump-priming activities may not always have funding available so we are able to provide a number of hours free RSE support for new projects.
Access to RSEs is usually through costing support into your grants (RSEs at the moment are costed as Grade 7 or Grade 8 technial staff in most cases) as ‘Directly Incurred’ costs. This can be anything from 0.2FTE for one month through to 0.6FTE of an RSE for a longer period.
We can also support you in recruiting a full-time specialist RSE (either as technical staff or as a PDRA) and can work with your group to manage, mentor and support the RSE through the central service.
If you have a need for RSE support that can’t be costed into a grant, we have a ‘day rate’ scheme of £375 per day for Leeds projects and £600 (plus VAT) per day for external partners.
How to request
To get started you can submit details of your intended project via the contact form below outlining the scope of your project, the technical requirements and timescales. We’ll then get in touch to arrange a one-to-one scoping meeting from which we can work out how best to proceed.