I actually have "research software engineer" on my resume and you're right, it doesn't do much. In fact I don't think this is uncommon, at least in the US. Myse

I actually have "research software engineer" on my resume and you're right, it doesn't do much. In fact I don't think this is uncommon, at least in the US. Myself and former colleagues indeed have no trouble working in industry positions. However one thing to note is that many cases, research programming has specialized requirements that are rare for most industry positions and domain scientists. For example, numerical analysis to ensure stability of models, distributed computing to scale massive simulations or analytics, algorthims and visualizations to explore datasets, NLP, ML, etc. Some of these skills domain scientists develop but for the most part these are likely going to require someone with a CS background.