Your responsibilities

We are recruiting an Early-Career Professional (ORIGIN) within the CERN Graduate Programme. The successful candidate will be joining the EC-funded project: OSCARS, aimed to consolidate European Science Clusters computing requirements as part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) framework. 

The OSCARS project is bringing together the five European Science Clusters formed by Landmark European Research Infrastructures (RIs) in the fields of Astronomy and Particle Physics, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Photon and Neutron Sciences and Social Sciences/Humanities. The project has two main objectives: 1) Consolidate the current initiatives in Scientific Computing into sustainable interdisciplinary services, and 2) Lead and foster the involvement of a broader range of research communities.

The successful candidate will be involved in the consolidation activities led by CERN in the project, these are the areas of Large Scale Data Management (Data Lake model) and Analysis Platforms (Virtual Research Environments).

The backbone of the current Data Management and Data Processing initiatives is the existing Data Lake infrastructure for the Astronomy and Particle Physics Cluster (ESCAPE). The so-called ESCAPE Data Lake is a fully working infrastructure in constant evolution. The Data Lake model and its components will be extended to other Science Clusters and experiments within the OSCARS project.

The ESCAPE Data Lake is composed by Rucio as the core data management framework, FTS as the file transfer and data moving service and the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) as an analysis platform. These different systems are implemented and deployed within the CERN IT infrastructure, making wide use of virtualization stacks (Openstack, K8s), Configuration Management Systems (Puppet, Helm), DataBases, and logging/monitoring facilities (Elastic Search, Grafana).

The successful candidate will play a key role in the operation and maintenance of the Data Lake core services and the evolution of the Analysis Platform (VRE). They will achieve a deep understanding of the experiment's data and analysis workflows: Starting from the Data Acquisition Systems (e.g. Detectors, Telescopes, Antennas) and bridging user analysis tools (notebooks) with Large Scale Data Processing Facilities (computing farms, exascale providers, High Performance Computing Centers).

Your profile

Skills and/or knowledge

• We will value advanced knowledge in Linux OS, Linux System Administration, Basics of Python and bash scripting.
• Experience with Git, Continuous Integration, Containerisation, Kubernetes infrastructure, and relational databases (SQL, Oracle) would be also an important asset.
• Fluent in English, the ability to work in French would be an advantage.

Eligibility criteria:

• You are a national of a CERN Member or Associate Member State.
• You have a maximum of two years of professional experience since graduation in Computing Engineering / Physics (or a related field) by the application deadline.
• Your highest educational qualification is either a Bachelor's or Master's degree.
• You have never had a CERN fellow or graduate contract before.
• Applicants without University degree are not eligible.
• Applicants with a PhD are not eligible.

Job closing date: January 19 at 23:59 PM (midnight) CET.

Job reference: IT-GOV-ENG-2023-6-GRAE

Contract duration: 24 months, with a possible extension up to 36 months maximum.

Target start date: 01-February-2024

Documents required to complete your application:

• A CV
• A scanned PDF of your most recent relevant qualification