Summary of Key Duties & Responsibilities

CEDA can offer a 12 month Industrial Placement to a candidate interested in gaining first-hand experience of working in a vibrant field of scientific data handling and delivery.
Within a Linux-based computing environment the successful candidate will work primarily with the Python programming language.Web and scientific programming may also be required, depending on experience,using a range of other languages such as Java, JavaScript, C and FORTRAN.

• CEDA develops and manages a range of data-centric activities that this post might be involved with, including:
• Web applications/services to allow scientists to discover and access data sets.
• Services for processing and analysing Atmospheric Science and Earth Observation data including parallelisation and workflow management.
• The JASMIN cloud platform and associated tools.
• Cataloguing tools to enable searching and browsing of detailed scientific metadata.
• Data analytics, visualisation and sub-setting tools.
• Packaging and deployment tools.
• Within CEDA a wide variety of technologies and tools are being employed/explored.

These include:
• Web: Django, Pyramid, Tomcat, Bootstrap.
• Databases: PostgreSQL, SQLite, Elastic Search, Apache Solr.
• Processing/parallelisation: Platform LSF batch compute scheduler, OGC Web Processing Service.
• Packaging/deployment: Python Pip and virtualenv, RPM, Conda, Docker.
• Virtualisation/cloud: OpenStack, object store technologies, container orchestration technologies e.g. SWARM, Kubernetes.
• Data: cf-python, Xarray, Iris, Matplotlib, NetCDF4, R, CDO, NCO.

Responsibilities
The role will involve a range of tasks that might include:
• Maintenance of existing software systems.
• Development of scripts and tools to perform data management and analysis.
• Design and development of larger software systems/applications.
• Development of Django (python) web-applications and web APIs.
• Interactions with scientists/developers.
• Development of tools for working with large data sets and batch processing systems.
• Exploratory work with new technologies.
For more information about the role please contact Ag Stephens (ag.stephens@stfc.ac.uk).

Criteria to beassessed at Shortlisting (S), Interview (I) or both (S&I)

Essential:
• At university, enrolled on an undergraduate degree course and required or have requested to take a year out of studies to gain experience within industry (S)
• Right to live and work in the UK (S)
• Currently undertaking a degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or another relevant scientific discipline with a strong mathematical component (S).
• Experience of programming in Python (S&I)
• Experience of working in a Linux environment (S&I)
• Knowledge of software development principles, including writing and testing code (S&I)
• Interest in supporting the scientific community (S&I)
• Self-motivated, with good problem-solving and analytical skills (S&I)
• Able to work well in a team and willing to learn new skills and work on a variety of tasks (S&I)

Desirable:
• Robust software engineering methodologies including test-driven development, code review and continuous integration (S&I)
• Experience with web development frameworks particularly Django (S&I)
• Exposure to NoSQL database solutions such as Elastic Search and Apache Solr (S&I)
• Exposure to software for the deployment of virtualisation and cloud computing infrastructure e.g. OpenStack, VMware, Docker, and object store technologies (S&I)
• Technologies for parallel processing for example, Hadoop (S&I)
• Exposure to meteorology, climate science, Earth sciences, Earth observation or scientific computing (S&I)
• Experience of working with scientific data (S&I)
• Experience of working with Big Data (S&I)
• Good communication skills (S&I)