Duties

Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility. Located at Harwell Science & Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire, we enable world-leading research across a wide range of scientific disciplines and industrial applications.

We are looking for a high calibre software engineer to join our small but growing User Administration System team. The team is starting an exciting new project to develop a new User Administration System, as a Java web application with Spring, Hibernate, SQL, and using an Agile development process. This is an important project for Diamond, to which the successful candidate will make a significant contribution.

Our User Administration System enables the submission and review of proposals to use the facility, as well as scheduling and managing visits and experiments. The system is used by external facility users and Diamond staff; the principal users are currently the Diamond User Office team, who are the first point of contact for all users.

To work within the User Administration Software team on the full lifecycle development of the software needed to enable effective user administration at Diamond.

• Consult with system users and analyse their requirements, and make suggestions for improvements to the software;
• Design, code and test enterprise software to meet the requirements agreed between the team and system users - providing estimates of required tasks;
• Deploy software to and configure enterprise servers, including database administration;
• Support live systems, investigating and resolving incidents, interacting with staff and external users;
• Resolve reported faults in the software, and communicate with testers;
• Document all work, including instructions on how to build and deploy software;
• Peer review other team members’ work;
• Produce and maintain documentation describing system operation for its users, training them in system use;
• Develop and maintain expertise in software development tools and techniques, and advise team on their use.

Qualifications and Experience: Essential

• Experience of team software development;
• Experience of web application development using Java, Spring, Hibernate, SQL, HTML and CSS;
• Experience of using development support tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Subversion, Hudson and JIRA;
• Experience of configuring enterprise server software such as Tomcat and Apache HTTP Server;
• Object-oriented analysis and design;
• User interface design, especially for web;
• Relational database design and query;
• Effective team worker;
• Ability to interact effectively with staff at all levels;
• Good communication skills;
• Ability and initiative to get to the heart of the problem and take it effectively through to completion;
• Self motivated, interested in keeping pace with software development best practice;
• Good attention to detail.

Qualifications and Experience: Desirable

• Chartered Engineer and Chartered IT Professional (CEng MBCS CITP), or relevant degree, or equivalent qualification;
• Experience of agile development processes such as Scrum;
• Experience of using a database reporting engine such as JasperReports;
• Experience of writing command scripts on Linux and Windows;
• Database administration, especially Oracle;
• Technical writing.

Applying for employment
For further details on applying for employment at Diamond, please visit our 'Application Form' page.