A few years back I was kinda in this role: I was contacted by an old professor of mine who didn't know I moved out of academia and into software. He had recentl

A few years back I was kinda in this role: I was contacted by an old professor of mine who didn't know I moved out of academia and into software. He had recently won a grant and wanted to hire me as a post doc. In the end we arranged things so I would work 1-2 day a week for them, while keeping my day job. I ended up helping a few other postdocs with their code. I do have a PhD in physics, but in that position I was free to ignore the deeper part of the science (like reading literature, figuring out hypotheses) and I would mostly concerned in helping them set up their numerical experiments, or symbolic computations.