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.
If you have a software engineering background but no particular expertise in biology or information security, then I would suggest trying to find some existing open-source software project which is helpful to biosecurity work and then help to make it more robust and user-friendly. I haven't worked in biosecurity myself, but I can tell you from experience in other areas of biology that there are many software packages written by scientists with no training in how to write robust and usable software, and so there is a lot of low-hanging fruit for someone who can configure automatic testing, use a debugger or profiler, or add a GUI or web front end.