This is pretty much my job. I develop climate analysis software at a DOE national lab. We have a pretty reasonable career ladder for the &quot;research software engineer&quot;. A quick sample:<p>Me: Recent graduate (2012), early career. All dev, all the time.<p>Lead Dev: ~15-20 years experience, minor project management tasks, mostly just dev work. Gets author credit on scientists&#x27; papers every once in a while for his help in generating visualizations.<p>Principal Investigator: 30-40 years experience, created the software package that we develop in the early 90s, almost entirely project management.<p>Our organization doesn&#x27;t expect publications from us (though they&#x27;re a perk at raise time). There are a few conferences that we present at annually, some posters to make, but for the most part, I just write software that helps scientists do their jobs better. I&#x27;m just down the hall from some of the leading minds in climate science, and it&#x27;s really a great environment.<p>Of course, our lab varies wildly internally; any different project could have a drastically different experience, and different departments would have very different expectations.