@clacke @n8 @liw @mlinksva Plenty of examples of this in the UK: Sheffield, Manchester, UCL, Edinburgh, Imperial College to name a few https://ukrse.github.io/groups.html
Worth checking out https://society-rse.org/ and https://software.ac.uk/ for the growing body of evidence of the benefits of these roles and groups. Several other countries have Research Software Engineer associations too, including Germany and USA