A perspective to navigate the National Laboratory environment for RSE career growth

TL;DR

This paper discusses how research software engineers can navigate the National Laboratory environment by leveraging traditional scientific career strategies and addressing organizational challenges to enhance their impact and career growth.

Contribution

It provides a perspective on integrating RSEs into the National Laboratory landscape, highlighting opportunities and challenges for career development and organizational impact.

Findings

RSEs fit naturally into current scientific environments.

Traditional career activities benefit RSEs and projects.

Organizational introspection is needed to bridge communication gaps.

Abstract

This paper shares a perspective for the research software engineering (RSE) community to navigate the National Laboratory landscape. The RSE role is a recent concept that led to organizational challenges to place and evaluate their impact, costs and benefits. The premise is that RSEs are a natural fit into the current landscape and can use traditional career growth strategies in science: publications, community engagements and proposals. Projects funding RSEs can benefit from this synergy and be inclusive on traditional activities. Still, a great deal of introspection is needed to close gaps between the rapidly evolving RSE landscape and the well-established communication patterns in science. This perspective is built upon interactions in industry, academia and government in high-performance computing (HPC) environments. The goal is to contribute to the conversation around RSE career growth and understand their return on investment for scientific projects and sponsors.