Developer for Cloud-based Virtual research environments

at  Universiteit van Amsterdam

Developer for Cloud-based Virtual research environments
Faculteit/Dienst: Faculteit der Natuurw., Wiskunde & Informatica
Opleidingsniveau: Master
Functie type: Ondersteunend Beheer Personeel
Sluitingsdatum: 20 May 2024
Vacaturenummer: 12949
We are looking for two scientific programmers to develop services and tools for a Virtual Research Environment (VRE), including distributed data management, workflow automation, service deployment and performance optimization in Cloud environments.

OUR OFFER

The candidates will be contracted by the LifeWatch ERIC Virtual Laboratory and Innovation Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and will work within the premises of the Multi Scale Networks Systems Group, Informatics Institute at University of Amsterdam).
LifeWatch ERIC is a European Infrastructure Consortium providing e-Science research facilities to scientists seeking to increase our knowledge and deepen our understanding of biodiversity organisation and ecosystem functions and services in order to support civil society in addressing key planetary challenges.
LifeWatch ERIC seeks to understand the complex interactions between species and the environment, taking advantage of High-Performance, Grid and Big Data computing systems, and the development of advanced modelling tools to implement management measures aimed at preserving life on Earth.

Combining a wide range of ICT tools and resources with deep knowledge of the domain, LifeWatch ERIC’s mission is to be a “first class” worldwide provider of content and services for the biodiversity research community by:

• Offering new opportunities for large-scale scientific development
• Enabling accelerated data capture with innovative new technologies
• Supporting knowledge-based decision-making for biodiversity and ecosystem management
• Providing training, dissemination and awareness programmes.

ABOUT US

The MNS group is part of the Systems and Security Lab (SNE), one of the three research clusters at the Informatics Institute. The group focuses its researches on the fundamental architectural problems that arise from the interconnection of systems and data flows, in particular the delivery of secure and sustainable ICT services across multiple domains. Within the MNS group, the “quality critical distributed computing” team is specially interested in novel programming and control models for distributed applications across large scale cloud infrastructures, and in developing interoperable data management and virtual research environment solutions for enabling interdisciplinary researches, e.g. in environmental and earth sciences or medical domains. The team leads the VRE development in the LifeWatch VL innovation center, and provides the infrastructure automation solution to several projects such as ENVRI-FAIR and CLARIFY.
The candidate will closely collaborate with domain scientists from the domains of ecosystem and biodiversity in the groups of the Biogeography & Macroecology (BIOMAC) lab (http://biomac.org/) and the Department Theoretical and Computational Ecology (http://ibed.uva.nl/research ). It is expected that their work results in scientific papers, and that they participate and present the research at LifeWatch and other international meetings.

• The candidate will work closely with the data scientists, modellers, and domain researchers to develop customised digital twin building blocks based on simulations, data assimilation, and visualization components, and integrate software components as part of a distributed Virtual Research Environment for a broader community;
• The candidate will develop user-centered composition and integration tools for coupling those building blocks as digital twins based on application-specific scenarios;
• The candidate will actively review the state-of-the-art technologies in the context of cloud computing, semantic web, search engine, big data and scientific workflow management, follow Agile, Co-development and other best practices of modern software engineering in Cloud environments to effectively deliver solutions to the VRE;