I'm trying to work out what aspects of software someone with a couple of years' of programming experience under their belt could decide to pivot towards.
What I know so far: 80,000 Hours' software engineering career review says
Much of the work in biosecurity is related to handling and processing large amounts of data, so knowledge of how to work with distributed systems is in demand. Expertise in adjacent fields such as data science could also be helpful.
There is also a big focus on security, particularly at organisations like SecureDNA.
Most code in biosecurity is written in Python.
And elsewhere they and others talk about the relevance of infosecurity to biorisk.
It would be nice to have an ordering of these.
Web development seems like a generically useful skill for almost any organisation, but perhaps I should expect good web developers to be easier to come by than other kinds of specialists?
I wonder if bioinformatics or computational biology would also be useful.
I just wrote a relevant forum post on how simulation models / Agent-based models could be highly impactful for pandemic preparedness: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2hTDF62hfHAPpJDvk/simulation-models-could-help-prepare-for-the-next-pandemic
A crucial aspect of this is better software tools for building large scale simulations, so I would say this is a large opportunity for someone who wants to work in software engineering.
Even just working as a research engineer in an existing academic group building epidemiological models would be impactful in my opinion. The role of research engineer within academia is quite neglected because it tends to pay less than equivalent industry jobs.