About This Opportunity
This is an exciting opportunity for a Research Platform Engineering Fellow to help develop and evolve sciget.org, a digital research platform that supports scientific analysis at scale across imaging, biology, and other research domains.
Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team of research engineers, platform leads, and domain scientists, you will help shape the platform that researchers depend on for their day-to-day analysis work. As a core part of the role, you will stay close to the scientific use cases the platform serves, working with researchers to understand their workflows so that platform decisions are driven by real analysis needs.
The work spans:
- Containerised research environments that give scientists a reliable, reproducible foundation for their analyses
- Reproducible analysis workflows aligned with how scientists actually work
- Developer tooling and contribution workflows that support developers and community contributors in extending the platform
- Integration with national research cloud infrastructure
- Platform security, including container scanning, software supply chain hardening, and vulnerability management
You will be required to develop deep expertise in research platform engineering, while building an emerging research profile through methods publications, open-source contributions, and infrastructure design contributions referenced in peer-reviewed work.
In collaboration with senior staff and stakeholders, your key responsibilities will include:
- Contribute to the development of research design and proposals for platform engineering directions, including building and hardening core platform components in support of scientific analysis at scale.
- Provide expertise and knowledge to end-users and contributors for field-specific interpretation of platform data, integration patterns, and workflow translation.
- Maintain a state-of-the-art research platform including infrastructure-as-code, deployment automation, monitoring instrumentation, lifecycle policies, and platform documentation supporting both users and developers.
- Provide technical advice and support in the area of research software engineering, cloud infrastructure, and platform security to maximise research outcomes.
- Develop, deploy, and integrate platform infrastructure, including testing, release engineering, and continuous integration tasks.
- Maintain accurate records of platform configurations, deployment artefacts, and engineering outcomes.
- Ensure compliance with approved research ethics, data governance, and information security protocols.
- Ensure secure-by-design principles are applied to all platform activities following established research software engineering and cybersecurity guidelines.
- Contribute to research software quality assurance, code review, continuous improvement, and up-to-date operational runbooks (SOPs).
- Train personnel in effective and appropriate use of the research platform, including developer tools, CI/CD workflows, and platform features.
- Ensure a high standard of occupational health and safety, information security, and operational governance, including platform access registers, administration of research platform resources, inventory of digital assets, reporting and investigating security and operational incidents, and ensuring compliance with mandatory training and disclosures.
- Contribute to team culture and the broader research software community through committee participation, event organisation, and meeting participation.
This is a research focused, platform academic position. Further information can be found by viewing UQ’s Criteria for Academic Performance.
About You
- Completion or near completion of a PhD in computer science, software engineering, computational science, or a closely related discipline.
- Strong software engineering practice, with containerisation (Docker, Apptainer/Singularity), version control, and automated testing.
- Hands-on experience with Linux systems and research cloud infrastructure (ARDC Nectar or equivalent).
- Experience designing, deploying, or contributing to research platforms or reproducible computational environments, with a track record of open-source contribution.
- Ability to work directly with research scientists and translate their workflows into platform features.
- Publication or technical output record (methods papers, technical reports, or conference presentations) commensurate with an early-career research position.
- Awareness of platform security practice, including container scanning, software supply chain hardening, and vulnerability management (desirable).
About UQ
As part of the UQ community, you will have the opportunity to work alongside the brightest minds, who have joined us from all over the world, and within an environment where interdisciplinary collaborations are encouraged. As part of our commitment to excellence in research and professional practice in academic contexts, we are proud to provide our staff with access to world-class facilities and equipment, grant writing support, greater research funding opportunities, and other forms of staff support and development.
The greater benefits of joining the UQ community are broad: from being part of a Group of Eight university, to recognition of prior service with other Australian universities, up to 26 weeks of paid parental leave, 17.5% annual leave loading, flexible working arrangements, access to exclusive internal-only vacancies, and genuine career progression opportunities via the academic promotions process.
Interested?
For more information about this opportunity, please contact Dr Aswin Narayanan -a.narayanan@uq.edu.au
For application inquiries, please reach out to the Talent Acquisition team at talent@uq.edu.au, stating the job reference number (below) in the subject line.
When you apply, please ensure you upload a resume, cover letter, and responses to the ‘About You’ section.
Other Information
Pre-employment checks may include: verification of the right to work in Australia, qualifications. This may also include checks relating to gender-based violence matters or other integrity and conduct requirements.
You must maintain unrestricted work rights in Australia for the duration of this appointment to apply. Employer sponsored work rights are not available for this appointment.
We're dedicated to equity, diversity, and inclusion. We recognise that career pathways and opportunities differ, and encourage applications from candidates who may not meet every criteria but can demonstrate their potential relative to opportunity. We’re also happy to support any accessibility needs throughout the recruitment process. Just let us know how we can help by emailing talent@uq.edu.au or calling +61 7 3365 2623.
Applications close 28 May 2026 at 11.00pm AEST (R-64785).
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