The Evolving Role of Researchers and Research Software Engineers

The role of the researcher is rapidly evolving as LLMs and coding agents become part of everyday scientific workflows, shifting the work from writing code towards verifying it. The role of the research software engineer is shifting with it. In this talk we draw on our experience as research software engineers at the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing, home to Isambard-AI and part of the UK's AI Research Resource (AIRR), looking at this shift from the perspective of both the engineer and the infrastructure provider. As users increasingly turn to these tools, we discuss what it takes to support them, and what that means for research in heliophysics and UK space science more broadly.