Freelance Research Software Engineer Jobs in California

At the University of California, Berkeley , we are dedicated to fostering a community where everyone feels welcome and can thrive. Our culture of openness, freedom, and belonging makes it a special place for students, faculty, and staff, who are among the most talented and accomplished anywhere, including Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and MacArthur Fellows. Since our founding in 1868, we have been an engine for innovation - driving intellectual, economic, and social progress that benefits California, the U.S., and beyond. Together, we change the world.
At Berkeley, the best careers are built on a foundation of continuous learning and growth . We actively support professional development by providing all full-time staff employees with at least 80 hours of paid time per year and providing space for supportive colleague communities via numerous employee resource groups.
We invite applicants who are inspired by our Principles of Community and who are eager to be part of our exciting Strategic Pla n, which charts Berkeley's next era of excellence.
Learn more about some of our accomplishments at Points of Pride.
Departmental Overview
Since its launch in 2013, BIDS has been dedicated to accelerating data-driven discovery by fostering an environment of open inquiry and cross-disciplinary collaboration. We have successfully broken down traditional academic silos, uniting domain experts from the life, physical, and social sciences, as well as the arts and humanities, with methodological leaders in computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics.
BIDS is expertly positioned as the central hub for advancing interdisciplinary data science research, academic training, and software development within the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. BIDS houses UC Berkeley's Open Source Program Office and champions open science, open source software, and open scholarship. We serve as a discipline-agnostic space to rally Berkeley's unique ecosystem, driving forward innovative collaborations that explore the profound impacts of Artificial Intelligence on both science and society.
AI is changing what's tractable in scientific research, enhancing scientists' ability to tackle ambitious and far-reaching research questions; however, it also risks outpacing the community's already strained capacity to scrutinize new work, thereby eroding the rigor that makes the scientific cannon worth building on. Without infrastructure that makes AI-assisted workflows legible, the production of new work risks outpacing our ability to evaluate it, eroding the rigor that makes the scientific record worth building on. Lightcone Research is an international initiative building infrastructure for rigorous AI-assisted computational science, to help ensure that the expanded reach enabled by AI strengthens that record rather than weakening it.
Research Software Engineers (RSEs) bring software engineering expertise and open source development practices to Lightcone's developer and user community . They play the role of an "expert collaborator" who solves problems at the intersection of research, software, and modern computing infrastructure. They regularly investigate -- and propose solutions to -- open-ended, unstructured challenges that arise from the computational needs of researchers. They scope, and deliver on technical requirements that require an in-depth evaluation of cutting-edge data science and AI applications. They are integral members of a diverse team, co-creating the Lightcone ecosystem of open source tools to solve real-world challenges in the space of AI-assisted scientific research .
This role will work closely with senior researchers and industry partners . They advocate for open science and open scholarship best practices, and meet national and global standards around responsible and ethical uses of technology. They showcase research outputs and software tools to the research community and industry partners through presentations, research papers, blog posts, interactive data visualizations, and open source software packages.
The member of the technical team working on Lightcone's agentic AI infrastructure is experienced in integrating modern AI systems, agents, and tools into research and data-intensive workflows. Their skills extend the use of agentic AI for software development into building software for the scientific lifecycle: including making AI-assisted research robust, rigorous, and reproducible. They are familiar with the design and development of current standards in AI-assisted research, including MCP servers, ACP integrations, and the rapidly evolving landscape of harness architectures. They are knowledgeable about both open and proprietary AI solutions, integrating components to enhance interoperability across tools and models. They are comfortable building software to coordinate compute resource management in hosted environments ranging from custom clusters to large-scale high-performance computing systems and Kubernetes-managed cloud platforms.
Application Review Date
The First Review Date for this job is: 8/24/26 - Open until filled
Responsibilities
40% Applies advanced software concepts to plan, design, develop, modify, debug, deploy, and evaluate highly complex interface, software, and/or infrastructure solutions that enable agentic AI systems to produce reproducible scientific research .
20% Contributes to and supports the maintenance and sustainability of Li ghtcone's open source projects. Maintenance can include issue triage, code and documentation review, contributing new features, mentoring new contributors, continuous integration testing, and release management.
10% Develops project plans as part of an interdisciplinary team, delivers allocated tasks, and communicates progress regularly.
5% Analyzes existing highly complex open source software or works to formulate logic and devises algorithms for new modular and composable software systems. Understands and applies industry practices, open source community standards, and department policies and procedures in depth.
5% Enables collaborators to design, implement, reproduce, and extend highly complex data analyses to address real-world research problems, including accessing data from varied multi-modal processing pipelines, working directly with domain scientists and open source communities as appropriate.
5% Prepares and approves or obtains approval for user and developer documentation. Initiates and oversees changes in development, maintenance and system standards. Sets the technical requirements for software specifications, engaging across open source communities as appropriate. Communicates technical requirements to interdisciplinary experts and trainees with varied technical expertise
5% Stays up to date on applicable research and software engineering standards, including applications of agentic AI for science (new models and tools, agentic architectures, and evaluation methods), and security and accessibility practices. Implements cutting-edge practices into software and protocol standards, meeting UC Berkeley-specific policy requirements and national and international standards as applicable.
5% Serves as technical lead for one or two software development projects of moderate to broad scope. Meets with interdisciplinary project teams and provides regular updates on progress.
5% Advances the work of the UC Berkeley Open Source Program Office (OSPO) by demonstrating the value and impact of open source practices.
Required Qualifications

• Advanced programming skills, including Python expertise.
• Demonstrated fluency using agentic AI and large language model (LLM) coding agents (such as Claude and/or Codex) for software engineering.
• Experience building software, tooling, or infrastructure for agentic AI / LLM systems such as agent frameworks, tool and skill integrations, or evaluation harnesses.
• Demonstrated software development and maintenance skills: version control with git, testing, continuous integration and/or continuous deployment with GitHub Actions or similar. Advanced knowledge of secure software development.
• Experience reviewing code through open discussion and iterations on GitHub. Demonstrated track record using issues and pull requests (or similar) for transparent and distributed project management.
• A curious mindset and appetite for navigating complexity and uncertainty. A track record of scoping and delivering on requirements from interdisciplinary teams of domain experts and trainees with varied technical expertise.
• Advanced skills associated with software specification, design, modification, implementation, and deployment of large-scale scope.
• Excellent project leadership and management skills.
• Demonstrated ability to understand functional needs and how systems can support those needs, particularly in the context of leveraging existing functionality in scientific open source libraries.
• Advanced experience with planning for real-world deployment and creation of feedback mechanisms across an interdisciplinary team.
• Demonstrated effective communication and interpersonal skills. Demonstrated ability to communicate technical information to technical and non-technical personnel at various levels in the organization and at academic and industry conferences.
• Self-motivated and works independently and as part of a team. Able to learn effectively and meet deadlines.
• Demonstrated complex problem-solving skills.
• Bachelor's degree in a related area and/or equivalent experience/training.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with high-performance computing and scientific workflow systems such as job schedulers (eg: SLURM), containerization (eg: Docker, Apptainer / Singularity, Kubernetes), and workflow tools (eg: Snakemake, CWL, Dask, Nextflow).
• Experience participating in multi-stakeholder open source communities: distributed decision making, navigating uncertainty, building consensus, coordinating paid and volunteer contributors, mentoring new members.
• Proven track record building tools that are used by research teams to conduct cutting-edge innovation in the life sciences, physical sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry), and geosciences, and/or the social sciences, humanities, and public health.
• Experience conducting research in a data-intensive scientific domain in academia or industry.

Salary & Benefits
For information on the comprehensive benefits package offered by the University, please visit the University of California's Compensation & Benefits website.
Under California law, the University of California, Berkeley is required to provide a reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role and should not offer a salary outside of the range posted in this job announcement. This range takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to experience, skills, knowledge, abilities, education, licensure and certifications, analysis of internal equity, and other business and organizational needs. It is not typical for an individual to be offered a salary at or near the top of the range for a position. Salary offers are determined based on final candidate qualifications and experience.
Anticipated hiring range: $104,600 - $154,500; UCB salary range: $104,600 - $195,600. The salary offer to the final candidate will take into consideration their experience and salary equity with current UC Berkeley employees working in similar roles.
Other Information
Please submit a cover letter including one concrete, creative example of how you've used agentic AI in your area of expertise - whether in research, software engineering, or elsewhere. Please include a link (repo, notebook, demo, write-up, etc) if one is available.
Conviction History Background
This is a designated position requiring fingerprinting and a background check due to the nature of the job responsibilities. Berkeley does hire people with conviction histories and reviews information received in the context of the job responsibilities. The University reserves the right to make employment contingent upon successful completion of the background check.
Misconduct Disclosure
As a condition of employment, the final candidate who accepts a conditional offer of employment will be required to disclose if they have been subject to any final administrative or judicial decisions within the last seven years determining that they committed any misconduct; received notice of any allegations or are currently the subject of any administrative or disciplinary proceedings involving misconduct; have left a position after receiving notice of allegations or while under investigation in an administrative or disciplinary proceeding involving misconduct; or have filed an appeal of a finding of misconduct with a previous employer.
Misconduct means any violation of the policies or laws governing conduct at the applicant's previous place of employment, including, but not limited to, violations of policies or laws prohibiting sexual harassment, sexual assault, or other forms of harassment, discrimination, dishonesty, or unethical conduct, as defined by the employer. For reference, below are UC's policies addressing some forms of misconduct:
UC Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy
UC Anti-Discrimination Policy
Abusive Conduct in the Workplace
Equal Employment Opportunity
The University of California is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, protected veteran status, or other protected status under state or federal law.