Science Processing Developer – Storage and Archive (LTC)

Location: Cape Town, Western Cape

Type of Employment: Contract

Job Level: Prof Qualified

Closing date: 19 October 2021

About the Position:

The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) spearheads South Africa’s activities in the Square Kilometre Array Radio Telescope, commonly known as the SKA, in engineering, science and construction. SARAO is a National Facility managed by the National Research Foundation and incorporates radio astronomy instruments and programmes such as the MeerKAT and KAT-7 telescopes in the Karoo, the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) in Gauteng, the African Very Long Baseline Interferometry (AVN) programme in nine African countries as well as the associated human capital development and commercialisation endeavours.

Purpose:

SARAO is currently seeking to appoint a storage, archives and tape developer to join the team that develops and maintains the observatory’s storage solution and archive. The developer will be expected to take part in the planning, design, development, testing, and deployment of storage software solutions, work with other colleagues to design, deploy and maintain the underlying storage and archive infrastructure, and to provide the ongoing support for the solution.

Key Requirements:

Minimum education requirement: 

• Qualified with at least a 3-year tertiary qualification in computer science, computer engineering, related applied science or engineering qualification.

Minimum work experience required: 

• A minimum of 5 years’ experience developing storage solutions, configuring and deploying peta scale network storage solutions
• Experience with file systems implementation (e.g., Ceph, BtrFS, ZFS, Ext4, NFS)
• Experience in Linux systems programming, preferably using Python programming language
• Experience in Docker / Kubernetes programming
• Knowledge and experience in Agile practices

Desirable additional education, work experience and personal qualities:

• Familiarity or understanding of distributed storage systems (Ceph, S3)
• Excellent git skills
• Desire to continuously learn, problem solve and acquire new skills with cutting edge technology
• Familiarity with JIRA or other task management software packages
• Experience testing, automating, operating, and troubleshooting production systems
• Knowledge of cloud native technologies and protocols including containerization (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes), virtualization, REST

Duties Include (but not limited to): 

• Development, maintenance and support of the Science Processing storage and archive ecosystem
• Contributions to the development, review and implementation of the SARAO science data lifecycle policy
• Development, maintenance and support of data transfer needs between SARAO and its data users
• Analysis of user requirements and conversion of accepted requirements into solutions
• Rollout, upgrade and maintenance of storage and archive infrastructure
• Build and release maintenance and optimization of software build and release process
• Support IT security and related incident response
• Develop relevant documentation for users and systems engineering
• Researching, designing and developing next iterations of the storage and archive solution set
• Scripting and automation of builds, integration and release tasks
• Support operations of the production environment
• Research new tools, technologies and best practice
• Pilot new technology implementations
• Occasional after hours support

As a business unit of the NRF, SARAO is committed to employment equity and redress

SARAO reserves the right to amend and/or withdraw adverts at any time without notification.