I am a Research Software Engineer in the Southampton Research Software Group. Our role is to blend a research background with an up to date knowledge of software engineering to write sustainable software in many academic domains. I became interested in Research Software Engineering during my PhD in astrophysics where I saw many examples of researchers engaging in unsustainable software practices; at best this was ‘reinventing the wheel’ at worst it included data analysis or modelling that was untested and potentially producing incorrect results. Furthermore, many projects that rely on a PostDoc or PhD student would become unusable after the software author left. My involvement in ReproducibiliTea and UKRN helps to raise awareness of better computational practices and how this can improve the reliability, sustainability, and reproducibility of research software.