In this episode of RSE Stories, we talk with Alex Koufos, a fellow Stanford Research Engineer that is passionate about simulations, robotics, and computational physics. Alex knew what he was looking for in terms of a research role, and then struggled to find it when he first graduated. When he finally found his perfect niche, the recent events of 2020 have made it a fight to again find security. Is there hope? On RSE Stories we interview a lot of successful groups and individuals, but we need to remember that this is not the reality for so many of us as research software engineers. Why is it so hard, and how can we do better?