Application Support / Scientific Container Engineer

Job description

  Job facts

As a core member of the Roche Scientific Infrastructure (RSI) team the Application Support / Scientific Container Engineer will be responsible for developing and maintaining all aspects of infrastructure for building and maintaining services supporting the installation of scientific applications in the shared computing environments of RSI. These services will enable IT partners to build and maintain applications that can execute in a variety of environments provided by, or compatible with, RSI infrastructure. Working closely with other members of the RSI team and Infrastructure Services, the successful candidate will need to rely on their experience and knowledge, working collaboratively with partner IT groups to provide solutions that enable automated builds, which produce containers for execution in internal and external environments. The successful candidate is expected to be familiar with both Docker and Singularity containerisaton technologies, as well as an understanding of the resource requirements for scientific applications and have familiarity with the use of job schedulers and common workflow tools. The candidate would be responsible for contributing to the evolving development and use of containers and related infrastructure tools for use in a shared computing environment. They will also provide technical consultancy to ensure effective utilization and tight integration with job scheduling, as well as data access via object storage platforms

Main responsibilities and desired skills are:

·  Contributing to the strategy and engineering of the containerisation and hosting infrastructure for creating and maintaining containers, the container registry and overseeing the operation of the service
·  Consulting and partnering with IT partners and scientists to build and publish containers for scientific applications
·  Responsible for engineering and maintaining the end-to-end infrastructure for scientific containers including the build file repository, automated build infrastructure, standard templates, repository maintenance and Unix container services installation, configuration and maintenance
·  Deep knowledge of container architecture and execution with practical experience with Singularity and/or Docker. Working knowledge of virtual file systems, their integration in containers and integration and use of Identify & Access Management (I&AM) integration within containers and familiarity with other scientific application build and management systems such as EasyBuild and LMOD
·  Working closely with other members of the RSI team to ensure that scientific workflows can be effectively executed at scale using the RSI service and effectively integrate with other core services (network, data management services, I&AM, automation)

The Application Support / Scientific Container Engineer will be an experienced scientific and/or IT professional. With a Bachelor's degree (advanced degree preferred) in a relevant field of technology, science or business and possessing the following qualifications:

·  5 to 10 years' experience with managing scientific applications and their use in scientific environments, as well as 3-5 years with current container technologies and their execution in shared scientific computing environments
·  Experienced in the configuration and running of a Singularity container service as well as the supporting container and automation infrastructure. Additionally, familiarity with Docker for development environments and as the basis for Singularity containers is desirable
·  Experienced in supporting multithreaded applications, alternate computing technologies (GPU, FPGA) and complex workflows is desirable
·  Experienced in one or more scripting languages (e.g. Python, Ruby) to automate job flow and control for creating and maintaining the overall container service(s)
·  Experienced in the use of I&AM technologies for credential generation and role-based management of data and applications within containers as well as familiarity with Unix variants for the creation of containers that comply with quality and security requirements

Get in touch with the Recruiting Team Switzerland

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Engineering, Engineering > Design Engineering & Architecture

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