We have vacancies for a range of exciting projects to be run during the Spring Semester 2022.
March 2022 Update: the posts described on this page have now been filled. Details of recruitment for our summer projects will appear on our website in April.
Details of the Posts
The projects will run across the Spring Semester and will require no more than 7 hours per week of work during term time weeks. Exact starting and end dates can be found for each project below. Details of how to apply are given at the end of this page.
The base pay rate is £10.08 per hour, with an additional holiday payment on top of this. Payment is made monthly in arrears.
The projects will be run remotely but with some face-to-face meetings in some cases. Only students who expect to be resident in Manchester during the 2022 Spring Semester should apply. (We may amend this rule, depending on the situation with COVID as the semester approaches.)
The posts are open to any undergraduate student studying at the University of Manchester, including first year students and students who are studying remotely this semester. We especially welcome applications from groups of people who are under-represented in software engineering. We aim to recruit diverse teams for Imago, containing a mixture of experienced team members and inexperienced but talented junior team members. Working for Imago is a great way to bootstrap your personal portfolio and add some real development experience to your CV.
The Projects
FLAG-ME VI
We have vacancies for 4-6 part-time developers to work with researchers from the Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre to create a demonstration version of a tool to assist pharmacists in improving medication safety for patients with visual impairments. The project will involve modifying or taking inspiration from existing open source projects, as well as designing clear user interfaces that can fit smoothly and unobtrusively into the pharmacists’ busy working day.
All team members will need to be able to communicate effectively with the multidisciplinary team, and will have the chance to work with and learn from experts in handling medical data, experts in patient safety and representatives of the visually impaired community.
In addition to software development, this project will provide experience of developing early stage software demonstrators for commercialisation, as well as videos, slide decks and other marketing materials. If successful, the project has the potential to make the dispensing of prescriptions for visually impaired patients safer and less stressful.
Starting date: 31st January 2022
End date: 1st May 2022
Keep-It-Human Game Project
We have vacancies for 4 part-time developers to design, develop and trial an early stage demonstrator of an online game, aimed at supporting the restoration of mangrove forests through the efforts of the charity Oceanus Conservation.
This project will give experience in software discovery skills for the early stages of the commercialisation journey, including working with clients and creating an exciting and innovative player experience. The project is being run in collaboration with the University of Manchester Innovation Factory and Keep It Human, a start-up founded by Professor Ricardo Climent.
Experience in game design and use of game engines, particularly Unreal Engine, will be an advantage if applying for this project. We are also looking for students with artistic and graphic design skills, as well as creativity and problem solving ability.
Starting date: 31st January 2022
End date: 1st May 2022
Impact Accelerator Open Source Pilot
We have vacancies for 4 part-time developers to take on an existing codebase and improve it to make it suitable to be published as an open-source project; followed by publicising the project using technical posts, videos, user-group and later conference talks.
This project will give experience in software development lifecycle and long-term maintenance, software quality and security, writing and maintaining documentation, technical PR; and later community building and ultimately running an open-source based organisation.
Experience in open-source software development lifecycle, publishing technical content (text and video), open-source contributions will be an advantage if applying for this project.
Starting date: 31st January 2022
End date: 1st May 2022
Association for AI Website Tools
We have vacancies for 4 developers to work with an external client to develop the website for the UK Association for AI. The client needs a range of membership, payment and event management tools to be created, to help this recently formed organisation to grow and expand. This project needs a disciplined team, able to deliver new features regularly across the short timescales of the project, guided by the client’s priorities. We will be looking to recruit into the following roles: business analyst, UX engineer, test/deployment engineer and backend developer.
This project gives a great opportunity to work on a public-facing web site that you can add to your portfolio, as well as being in on the ground for the creation of a new professional organisation in a very fashionable area.
Starting date: 31st January 2022
End date: 1st May 2022
Agile Coaching Games for Flexible Learners
We have vacancies for 6 students to help us adapt our current collection of coaching games for teaching agile software engineering to a flexible learning context. For some of our games, this will mean converting a team activity done face-to-face over a period of (say) 20 minutes into an online web-based activity that can deliver the same learning outcomes when played individually or as a distributed team over a period of days or weeks. Other games will need to be redesigned from the ground up, or replaced with alternatives proposed by the agile software engineering community that are better suited for flexible learning (e.g. from tastycupcakes.org). We have offers of help with game design from software engineers at Google, Arm and the BBC.
This project will involve a mixture of serious game design, web development and, if we can move quickly enough, some simulation/AI coding. It will give experience in designing and trialling coaching activities, as well as providing a good grounding in the agile practices and principles that the games aim to teach.
We particularly welcome applications from students with artistic and graphic design abilities, alongside the more obvious web development and games design skills that this project needs. As well as general developer roles, we’ll be looking to recruit into a UX role and a QA role, to ensure that we deliver a robust and reliable product with a great user experience.
Starting date: 31st January 2022
End date: 1st May 2022
How to Apply
To apply, e-mail Suzanne Embury (suzanne.m.embury@manchester.ac.uk) by the deadline, providing the following documents.
- A covering letter telling us why you want to apply to join Imago, which of the projects on offer you would like to apply for and what skills or experience you bring that would make you a great member of our team.
You may apply for several (or all) of the projects in one application. If you have skills or experience that are specific to a particular project, you can include a paragraph explaining that in your covering letter. You can include as many project specific paragraphs as you wish.
- An up-to-date CV and (optionally) links to your personal portfolio of projects, or any public source code repositories you have contributed to.
Deadline for applications: 5.00pm GMT on Monday, 20th December 2021.
Appointments to the posts will primarily be made on the basis of an interview, but in some cases we may make an offer based on the CV and covering letter alone.
Interviews for the posts will be held on 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th of January 2022. We’ll aim to let you know whether you have been shortlisted for a post or not by 3rd January 2022 at the latest.
Employment with Imago is subject to the standard rules on eligibility for work in the UK and willingness to comply with the University’s staff policies on ownership of IP and non-disclosure of confidential information.
Note: some of the posts we are advertising here are still going through the process of approval by the University and so may be subject to changes before the posts can begin.
More information about Imago can be found at imago.cs.manchester.ac.uk.