Science Processing Developer – DevOps (LTC)
NRF / SARAO
Location: Cape Town, Western Cape
Type of Employment: Contract
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 DevOps developer to automate and support the tools and processes relating to continuous delivery, integration and deployment for science data processing software packages, platforms, operating systems and infrastructure.
Key Requirements:
Minimum education requirement:
Qualified with 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 in DevOps and computer engineering
- Experience in open source software stack: Linux, Ansible, Docker
- Experience configuring computer infrastructure: Servers, networks and their supporting infrastructure
- Experience implementing logging and monitoring software stack
- Knowledge of Python programming language
- Knowledge and experience in Agile practices
Duties Include (but not limited to):
- Development, maintenance and support of the Science Processing DevOps ecosystem
- Rollout, upgrade and maintenance of compute infrastructure
- Implement and manage the logging and monitoring toolset
- Build and release maintenance and optimization of software build and release process
- 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
- Modifying existing DevOps systems to correct errors, to adapt it to new hardware or to upgrade interfaces and improve performance
- Occasional after hours’ support
- Provide technical guidance and input
- Consulting with observatory’s other operations teams in order to optimise the compute environment
- Support IT security and related incident response
- Develop relevant documentation for users and systems engineering
- Researching, designing and developing DevOps systems
- Conducting research and improving or developing concepts, theories, instrumentation, software and operational methods related to DevOps
Additional notes:
Desirable additional education, work experience and personal qualities:
- Experience in open source software stack: Jenkins, Kubernetes
- Experience implementing the ELK stack
- Desire to continuously learn, problem solve and acquire new skills with cutting edge technology
- Familiarity with JIRA or other task management software packages
- Familiarity with agile software development approaches
- Understand concepts of MAAS, PAAS
- Understand DevOps concepts of CI/CD
- Work with physical compute infrastructure
- Work with internet concepts, protocols and technologies
- analyse and solve problems
- utilize a network of contacts relevant to SARAO
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.
