Software Engineer for Web Services

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) develops and operates cutting-edge, high-performance computing (HPC) systems  as an essential service facility for science. The centre enables world-class research through its scientific user lab, which is available to domestic and international researchers in academia, industry, and the business sector. The centre is operated by ETH Zurich and has offices in Lugano (headquarters) and Zurich.

Science gateways are becoming increasingly popular for scientific communities. It is important for CSCS to provide compatible, modern interfaces that enable users to implement innovative use cases on top of our services. For example, we need to enable users to submit compute jobs either programmatically or through web portals. As a complement to this, Jupyter-based services provide familiar access to our computational resources.

To expand the team and its capabilities, CSCS has an open position at our office in Lugano for a software engineer specialised in web services.

Initially you will be involved in the following activities:

• Joining the team of FirecREST, a RESTful API for managing HPC resources, to propose, design, and develop new features and enhancements, such as a new web UI, an interface for workflow configuration, and a Python CLI module for asynchronous calls;
• Studying and implementing solutions to provide Jupyter interfaces tailored to our new “Alps” infrastructure, such as customized spawners;
• Creating innovative services to help our end users moving data in, out, and across our different systems.

As a member of our Innovative Resource Access Methods (IRAM) group, you will work alongside other software and system engineers, who collaboratively design, implement, and maintain web services like those mentioned above.

Your responsibilities:

• Collaborate with stakeholders to effectively fulfil functional and non-functional requirements and participate in their implementation;
• Join agile development teams responsible for designing, developing, and operating web and RESTful services with a sharp focus on engineering and automation;
• Where applicable, evaluate the adoption of existing products, preferably from open source communities;
• Consider the multi-tenancy necessities of our infrastructure as you design and implement solutions for automated deployment and unified operation of multiple instances of services;
• Promote and coordinate the integration of central services, such as IAM’s Single Sign-On, API catalogs, and authorization gateways.

Expected qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field;
• Python proficiency and experience developing RESTful services ( FastAPI, OpenAPI, AsyncIO);
• Experience with full-stack web development (front-end, back-end, data modelling) as well as event-driven/microservice architectures;
• Experience with containerization and orchestration ecosystems, as well as with automation tools and practices (Gitlab CI);
• Ability to operate services in a Linux or Kubernetes environment;
• Advanced knowledge of the Jupyter stack and its ecosystem.

Experience with the following is preferred, though there will be opportunities to learn and gain experience on the job:

• HPC systems usage;
• IAM workflows, and Open Policy Agent (OPA);
• Gateway technologies (WSO2 Identity Server, Kong, HashiCorp Consul or similar).

In an organization that values autonomy, ownership and continuous learning, the successful candidate will have the opportunity to gain specialized hands-on experience through activities characterized by the challenging aspects typical of the HPC field.

• ETH Zurich is a family-friendly employer with excellent working conditions.
• You can look forward to an exciting working environment, cultural diversity and attractive offers and benefits.
• We value the diversity of our team and, to further enhance the diversity of our workforce, we particularly encourage women to apply.