System Engineer for ETH Biomedical Research IT Platform Leonhard Med

System Engineer for ETH Biomedical Research IT Platform Leonhard Med

80%-100%, Zurich, permanent

the Scientific IT Services of ETH Zurich (SIS, a section of the ETH central IT Services ) aims at bridging the gap between computational research and IT services. In doing so it provides a stimulating, flexible and family-friendly working environment; working closely together with ETH researchers to provide support in the wide area of scientific computing from data management and analysis, development of scientific software to the operation of high performance and cloud computing infrastructures.

the Scientific IT Services of ETH Zurich (SIS) is also supporting the biomedical and personalized health research community – one of ETH’s strategic scientific areas - with “big data” and computing services. For this,

In particular, SIS is operating Leonhard Med: a scientific IT platform to securely store, manage and process confidential research data. Leonhard Med presents a unique challenge of establishing a secure scientific IT platform that is compliant with the highest IT security standards, while allowing an high-degree of flexibility for end-user scientist to experiment with cutting edge biomedical research - from classical bioinformatics and statistics to large-scale data analysis to AI and deep learning.

Leonhard Med is an on-premise secure cloud-based infrastructure using:

• OpenStack as the underlying virtualization management middleware;
• Kubernetes as a container-based service orchestration;
• Ansible as a configuration management and application-deployment system.

To continue the development and operation of the Leonhard Med platform, SIS is looking for an experienced: System engineer

Job description

The position will be part of a growing team of expert system engineers and system administrators that ensure engineering, development, and operation in production of Leonhard Med. Together with your team you will have the responsibility of the day-to-day operation of the secure infrastructure and of its services while, at the same time, constantly improving its operation by automation at all levels and updating its security features to keep pace with the latest standards. You will also be part of the engineering effort to scale the Leonhard Med infrastructure and its services to cope securely, effectively and efficiently with a wide spectrum of use cases at ETH and at the Swiss national level.

Your profile

You will be part of a team that will have the responsibility of:

• Day-to-day operation of the secure infrastructure and of its services
• Constantly improving deployment, configuration and operation by automation at all levels following our Infrastructure-as-Code approach.
• Collaborate with the engineering and implementation of security measures, user workspaces, and new services
• Help our diverse community of scientists in using our computing infrastructure and collaborate within the team to guarantee smooth operations of the environment.
• Configure, deploy, maintain, and document scientific computing frameworks offered as a service (JupyterHub, RStudio, Shiny, etc.), with a focus on stability and performance.

You have the following profile:

Essential

• Strong experience with Linux systems administration, preferably in an HPC-based research environment
• Knowledge of virtualization platforms
• Experience with large-scale storage infrastructure (from design to implementation, day-to-day operation and benchmarking)
• Hands-on experience in automating complex, repetitive tasks using Bash or Python (script-based system management) and in using version control systems for configuration management (e.g. git)
• Experience in Datacentres technologies and trends such as Software Defined Infrastructure, Compute virtualization, Software Defined Storage and Software Defined Network
• Demonstrated experience in configuration management and application deployment systems (such as Ansible, MAAS, Terraform)
• Experience with core IT security technologies (firewall and SSH server configuration, key management, VPNs)
• Good knowledge of incident management, monitoring tools, process automation, fail-over, disaster recovery
• An aptitude for finding good solutions to complex IT problems, together with a "focused on the finished product" mindset.
• Good communication skills and the ability to collaborate with other IT specialists are necessary.

The ability to communicate in English is a must (working language: oral and written).

Desirable

• Experience with service deployment based on container technologies (docker, kubernetes and container orchestration basics)
• Experience in operating and/or working with OpenStack
• Knowledge of HPC tools and technologies such as EasyBuild, Slurm, Singularity (apptainer)
• Experience with large-scale storage technologies such as CEPH
• Interest in in-depth HPC hardware environment design and tuning (storage, network, load balancing)

Your workplace

Your workplace

We offer

At the Department IT Services, we are committed to promoting flexible and family-friendly working models, and a healthy work-life balance is important to us. ETH Zurich supports a policy for diversity and inclusion and we especially encourage qualified female candidates to apply. Further more we offer:

• A highly interdisciplinary work environment with interesting and challenging tasks.
• Work within an agile team of experienced and highly motivated IT specialists.
• Opportunity to work and gain experience with cutting-edge computing technologies.
• Opportunity to engage in pioneering medical research IT projects and to closely collaborate with medical researchers.

We value diversity

Curious? So are we.

We look forward to receiving your online application including the following documents: CV, motivation letter, master or PhD certificate, contact details of two referees as well as further certificates and diplomas (optional). Please note that we exclusively accept applications submitted through our online application portal. Applications via email or postal services will not be considered.

Further information about Scientific IT Services can be found on our website www.sis.id.ethz.ch. For further information, please contact Dr. Sergio Maffioletti, Group Head Research IT Platforms, email Write an email (no applications).

About ETH Zürich

Curious? So are we.

We look forward to receiving your online application including the following documents: CV, motivation letter, master or PhD certificate, contact details of two referees as well as further certificates and diplomas (optional). Please note that we exclusively accept applications submitted through our online application portal. Applications via email or postal services will not be considered.

Further information about Scientific IT Services can be found on our website www.sis.id.ethz.ch. For further information, please contact Dr. Sergio Maffioletti, Group Head Research IT Platforms, email Write an email (no applications).