Software Dev Research Jobs

L.Jenkins

An odd one, but I would have an interest in R&D as a Developer. I applied for a role last year, but sadly I was unsuccessful. I'm in a Contract role at the moment and I hate it. I love the work I do, but it's the rolling Contract shít is killing it for me. I would fear out much better if I had certainty, such as a fixed term role, knowing I would have to go on the hunt for another role in say, 2 years, but not knowing when I'll be let go is a real bother.

Ideally I want a permanent role for stability, but I'll take a fixed term role in R&D or any other Dev role. Currently keeping an eye on Irish Jobs and LinkedIn, but anyone know a Company offering R&D roles for Developers?

Aswerty

The research roles seem to mainly require domain or specialised knowledge. For example machine learning, machine vision, data analysis, etc. You'll also get a lot of engineers and scientists doing the programming in R&D because they have the domain knowledge in their field and often the programming requirements aren't particularly high. When doing R&D your code can be poor as long as you are ultimately able to prove a hypothesis or develop a working model.

I just had the one R&D role and I can tell you it wasn't a picnic. You often don't have a defined scope of work, just an end goal, but you still have deadlines. For example you might work for a year on something and not really have gotten anywhere and on top of that you have to deal with stakeholders expectations. A lot of people don't like the idea that a successful result of an R&D project can be “this isn't actually viable; this is why we shouldn't do this”. So you can find yourself working on something that you don't believe in but you still have to finish the project to completion.

bpmurray

I suspect most research roles in industry are at the level of post-doc, and you'd probably have to have a strong publishing record too. If you have your PhD and have been publishing, you're at least in the right ballpark.