Research Software Engineer

CDSS is currently seeking to appoint a Research Software Engineer with experience in scientific computing to strengthen our team of experts to support the ETH research community as well as administrative-technical units of ETH in finding, setting up and using the right tools / technologies for their work. Tasks include developing data processing pipelines or scientific web applications, improving and refactoring source code for computational and data science applications both on the methodological and implementation side or deploying and integrating applications to adequate compute environments (e.g., Kubernetes or high performance computing clusters, cloud services).

You will work closely with our customers to understand their data and their needs in working with the data, find solutions to address them, bridge knowledge gaps and provide training and consulting on tools and solution paths. In this role, you need to coordinate between our customers (e.g., researchers), members of SIS, other ITS experts, or external collaborators. Furthermore, you will investigate new tools and technologies relevant for scientific computing, particularly in the area of computational and data science.

This position requires

• Master or PhD degree in computational sciences or related field such as physics, bioinformatics, computer science, etc.;
• good understanding of the fundamentals of natural sciences, numerical methods and scientific programming;
• mastery of Python and 2-3 other programming languages (e.g., C/C++, R, Julia, Rust) and knowledge of object-oriented programming and software design;
• hands-on experience in full stack web development (back- and front-end) and corresponding web frameworks (e.g., FastAPI, Django);
• experience in applying best practices in scientific programming (e.g., automated testing and version control) and container technology (e.g., Docker);
• proficiency with the command line and the Linux compute environment.

Advantageous are

• experience in application deployment, operation and maintenance on Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines or cloud environments;
• hands-on experience with HPC clusters (e.g. Slurm), optimization and parallelization or GPU computing (e.g., Dask, ipyparallel) and with the usage of workflow managers (e.g., Snakemake, Nextflow, etc.).

In addition to the above analytical and technical abilities, this position demands a particular interest in and flexibility to learn or adopt new technologies quickly. Moreover, very good communication skills in English (German is an asset), solid project management skills and a service-oriented attitude are necessary to effectively and successfully enable research and scientific collaboration with ETH researchers and their partners.

The position is located in Zurich, though occasional travel to other Swiss cities will be required.