Software Engineer Data Operations @ELI-DC

The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) is the world’s most advanced international laser research infrastructure. It will provide the scientific community with access to a new generation of laser technologies delivering sources of ultra-intense high-energy particle beams and ultra-bright radiation in the femtosecond and attosecond timescales for multidisciplinary applications for a wide range of disciplines including materials sciences, engineering, medicine, biology, chemistry, and astrophysics.
The ELI Facilities are being commissioned and entering initial operations. Teams are working on-site to ensure that data acquisition and storage solutions are in place to fulfil initial requirements. When fully operational, ELI is expected to serve hundreds of scientific users per year generating an estimated 5 Petabytes of scientific data every year. ELI is committed to provide its users with state-of-the-art tools, methods and services for the acquisition, analysis, curation, and preservation of data derived from experiments, according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable).
These efforts are taking place within the framework and with the support of PaNOSC (Photon and Neutron Open Science Cloud), a project financed by the European Commission bringing together six major world-class European research infrastructures including ELI. PaNOSC aims at making scientific data produced at Europe’s major Photon and Neutron sources fully compatible with the FAIR principles in terms of data policy and services to users, and at contributing to the building up of the European Open Science Cloud.
The Extreme Light Infrastructure Delivery Consortium (ELI-DC) is an international association under Belgian law in charge of supporting the coordinated transition of ELI from implementation to operations. The ELI facilities will be operated as an integrated organization, the ELI European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ELI ERIC), which is being in the process of being established. It is planned that ELI ERIC will be the legal successor of ELI-DC after it is formally established in the coming weeks. It will have its registered office in the Czech Republic.

Position Overview

Within the framework of the PaNOSC project, we are seeking candidates for a position of Software engineer Data Operations. Respecting the ELI Data Policy, together with the FAIR principles and guidelines provided in the context of the PaNOSC project, the selected candidate will work to develop highly scalable software tools and services, writing clean, functional code for a wide range of applications and services that will operate with datasets of various types, format or size.

The Software Engineer Data Operations will be engaged in defining the specification of community-specific solutions within the data analytics area, and for the implementation and piloting of those solutions with for ELI users.
The position requires experience in data management and user access management (authentication-authorisation) systems. The Software Engineer Data Operations will work on the integration and development of applications with the technical and operational Data, Data Storage and Data Operations services of ELI, and ensures that the data management and data operations services as well as other data-related services are integrated and meet the specific needs of different individual experiments and users of the ELI Facilities.

Reporting and Interactions

The Software Engineer Data Operations will work under the direct supervision of and report to the Senior Coordinator for Data Management and Computing. He/she will be working together with relevant teams of the ELI Facilities involved in PaNOSC or in ad-hoc task groups.
He/she will be interacting with users to collect requirements and identify solutions, with the experimental groups to understand the particularities of each setup and with the General/Enterprise IT to validate that the solutions are compliant with the internal policies and best practices.

Duties and Responsibilities

The Software Engineer Data Operations will be working together with the Software Engineering groups of the ELI facilities in the integration and operation of different data ingestion tools and services, design and build the dedicated data curation and data correlation tools and services, pilots and validates new solutions with the users, integrates and develops the data transfer framework for the users’ datasets respecting the company’s data policies, data management plans and security standards.

Specific responsibilities include:

• Engaging with the users, control systems and data acquisition teams to capture the requirements and constraints for the services and solutions that are needed.
• Designing, developing and implementing tools for data correlation and data curation, creating and associating metadata to each dataset to make the data available for the user.
• Participating in the integration, development and operation of the file catalogue solutions for the ELI facilities.
• Testing, diagnosing, and optimization of software: analytic skills to identify and resolve problems with storage components or client applications.
• Re-using, refactoring, integrating, and porting of existing software.
• Knowledge and application of software life-cycle tools and procedures. As the system will work with multiple (tens-hundreds) of Terabytes of data per day, all software maintenance operations should follow also the facility maintenance strategy.
• Computer science degree in Information Technology, Software Engineering, Computer Science, Science or a related field or at least 3 years of experience in similar position, covering both front- and back-end development.
• 3+ years experience in software development, including data management and data storage technologies.
• Good understanding of Data Governance, Data Quality, Metadata Management, and Data Architecture.
• The ability to communicate effectively presenting the technical solutions.
• Detail- and results-oriented, with strong analytical, organisation and time management skills with the ability to collaborate with different teams and users types (technical/non-technical).
• Experience in working with international distributed teams is a plus.

Technical abilities

Candidates should demonstrate the following skills and expertise:

• GNU/Linux based operating systems, (distributed systems and architecture would be a plus);
• Message brokers;
• Version control systems’ experience, particularly, Git;
• Software development experience in Python, good knowledge of other programming language (C++, Julia, R, etc.);
• Experience in system administration and software design in Linux development, including deployment of services;
• Experience in working with multiple database technologies : MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Influx DB;
• Basic understanding on AI/ML algorithms.

Employment conditions

• Start of employment as soon as possible;
• Term: full-time employment with an initial duration of 3 years, extension beyond that initial term possible;
• Location: ELI Beamlines (Dolní Břežany, Czech Republic) or ELI-ALPS (Szeged, Hungary);
• Salary: base salary competitive, commensurate with experience of the selected candidate, additional remuneration elements to support relocation negotiable;
• (When the health situation will allow) Frequent short-term travels between the ELI Facilities and occasionally to partner organisations involved in PaNOSC are a key requirement of the position, including driving.

Candidates should send a letter of interest, including a concise description of experience and any other element relevant to the position, as well as their CV to: jobs@eli-laser.eu no later than 28 February 2021.

For informal enquiries about any aspect of the post, please contact Teodor Ivanoaica, Senior Coordinator for Scientific Computation and Data Management (teodor.ivanoaica@eli-laser.eu). All enquiries/information from the candidates will be handled confidentially. Selected candidates will be invited to take part in interviews in March 2021.