Research Software Engineer - reliability & provenance (2-month contract, £750+/day) IbogaineVault

Paid contract. £750+/day. 2 months (flexible schedule). Weybridge, Surrey / London - hybrid, with the first fortnight on site.

I've built an evidence map of 300 papers on ibogaine, - a citable research instrument with a DOI on Zenodo. Schema-governed metadata, Python throughout, a multi-stage extraction pipeline. I've carried it a long way on my own. Now I want one excellent engineer beside me to make it hold without me.

Why it has to be right: ibogaine can lift someone out of opioid dependence in a single session. It can also stop their heart. Both of those facts are true, and both live scattered across seven decades of literature - Portuguese theses, autopsy reports, court transcripts, grey material nobody has read. The map exists so a clinician can consult it before they screen someone, and a researcher can cite it and be right to trust it. Which collapses to one requirement: every claim carries its receipt.

That makes this a reliability problem, not an ML one. A real example: one of my validation guards used a pattern that matched nothing - and matching nothing was emitted as a warning, and warnings never fail the build. So the guard sat green on a drifted tree for weeks. "I couldn't check this" was being scored as "nothing is wrong." Fail open where it needed to fail closed. Most of what's actually load bearing here has that flavour.

What I need you on:

• Coherence - capable machinery in scattered pieces, consolidated into one reproducible pipeline a second person can run end to end.
• Reliability by construction - catching fabricated, missing or drifted data before it enters the map. (An AI step once invented a value that looked completely plausible and sat perfectly in range. The errors of omission - the thing that quietly isn't there - are the harder half.)
• Faithful retrieval and provenance - every claim traceable to the page it came from, with a human kept in the loop for the judgement calls rather than automated away.
• Built to last - tested, documented, reproducible enough to survive me stepping away for a month.

You: senior, and you think in default deny, fail closed, provenance, reproducible builds. Security, identity or regulated data experience is a strong fit - more so than an LLM CV. You don't need to know the science; I bring that. I care more about how you think than which frameworks you've used.

What you get: £750+/day, no equity and no "exposure" - and a named contributor credit on the citable record. CITATION.cff and the Zenodo DOI.

I read every reply properly, and I'd rather you tell me how you'd shape this than have me hand you a rigid spec.

Questions or applications: philip at ibogaine.space