[hackermailman]

Look around your local university's external job listings to get attached to a team as a research programmer. Often they are just looking for somebody to build and maintain a UI the scientists can use more easily, but you'll have lot's of opportunities to start rewriting algorithms to make them more efficient, and you're working with post-doc researchers and grad students so everyday is interesting not to mention some come with benefits, such as free tuition credits so you can P/T take courses at the school. Some resources here for teaching yourself these topics https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/

You will also collect letters of recommendations from the PhDs you work with, guaranteeing future employment on more research grant teams or for use to apply to a grad school program. Most students and developers pass up these opportunities because they don't pay near the same salary as industry does but if you can live with a hit in income you'll never be bored again. Sometimes you'll be the 'CTO', your job is to design whatever you think is the best way to sort/access/display research data which leads into Knuth territory generating all permutations, creating graphs, building a DSL, creating the user interfaces for it, best way to host an interface online for remote access, ect.