sure. you'd be surprised how little maths/physics most software engineers know. so there are lots of jobs out there where knowing that gives you an edge. my

sure. you'd be surprised how little maths/physics most software engineers know. so there are lots of jobs out there where knowing that gives you an edge. my first job after astronomy was working for a company that wrote software used in oil surveys. i worked on the mathematical model for a cable towed behind a boat. the maths was trivial, but only one other person in a company of 30ish could understand it (apparently). these days i work for a "geophysics consultancy" (a handful of guys who will write pretty much anything you want, usually related to seismic data processing - most fun recent project was using a GPU). but i've also worked on more "normal" software development projects (j2ee once, for example). to answer your question more directly - most observatories have software engineers on the staff.