Early in my career, I was lucky enough to find jobs (first a national lab, then a stats consulting company) that were very flexible about choice of language. But in recent years, most data-science-adjacent things I’m seeing are more specific about requiring Python, and more engineering-focused work requires something like C++.
Python is fine for canned routines, or if you’re able to stay well within the bounds of intended use for some framework. But outside of that, it can be pretty hard to get good performance, and its package development has all kinds of weird devops hoops to jump through. And C++ is… yeah I’m not doing that.
I think all of this comes down to curves of performance or functionality vs developer time, but maybe the language just isn’t well-known enough yet for employers to see this. So “Julia jobs” end up being effectively limited to companies that do all of their work in Julia. These are great and all, there just aren’t that many of them. And there’s no list of “companies that would be fine if you work in Julia”.
I work for a Python/C# house, and I work mostly on the Python side of things, but I just keep advocating to do components of our work in Julia. When Python hits its upper limit but the task requires easy access to modeling and other sciency stuff that are less easy in C#, I start a POC and show how easy it is to call my solution from the Python pipeline that we already have going.
Most POCs are rejected, but every now and then the tradeoffs are just too giant to ignore, and I merge it into main.
I know this doesn’t really answer your question, but I guess, any job is a Julia job if you are willing to make your boss roll their eyes at your persistence
That would be cool, but at least for now I’m geographically bound to Seattle. Still good to know! I know the group doing RxInfer is at TU/e, but I hadn’t heard of much else going on in that region. I guess that explains how they’re having a bonus JuliaCon there
Check out the map they have on the JuliaCon local website:
I work for a biology research institute. I’m rotating between a mix of Julia, Java, and Python. In this context, most of the work is on independent projects for labs that just need to accomplish a specific task. If I can get it done faster in Julia, the research labs are happy.
The institute most similar to mine in the Seattle area is the Allen Institute. I understand they are hiring:
When I talked to them about a job 1.5 years ago and mentioned Julia they seemed intrigued. The director of the Neural Dynamics institute is Karel Svoboda, who knows Tim Holy. Svoboda is familiar with the Holy Lab’s work including with Julia.
That’s really interesting. From what I’ve seen before, they mostly seemed to be building around Python and C++. But I don’t know anything about their Neural Dynamics institute. I’ll check their listings and ask around about possibilities. Thanks!
