Fixed-term: Funds are available for a period of 24 months.
Senior Research Software Engineer will work on the Quantify Earth planetary computing platform, a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and several open source stakeholders including UNEP-WCMC, IUCN and Tarides. The role involves designing, building and running a distributed processing cluster of GPUs, CPUs and petabytes of storage, towards the processing of environmental data.

Specific uses of the platform include:

• Development of a planetary computing engine that handle the ingestion, processing, transformation and tracing of global satellite and biodiversity data;
• A novel Unix shell that supports reversion and forking, towards the provenance tracking of complex computing and data science workflows;
• Development of data processing systems to build foundation models for code assistants in the OCaml language, as well as geospatial satellite data.

The successful candidate will work closely with Professor Anil Madhavapeddy, director of the Cambridge Centre for Earth Observation. The role will involve liaising with the system administration team at the Computer Science department to deploy the hardware and software required for Quantify Earth. This is a heterogenous cluster that supports RISC-V CPUs as well as Intel and ARM machines and will involve the development of a novel ZFS-based storage management system for our cluster needs.
Most of the group’s code is written in the OCaml language and specifically using cutting-edge “oxidised programming” extensions that are currently being developed in collaboration with Jane Street and Tarides. Therefore, a deep familiarity with the OCaml language and ecosystem is essential for a candidate to have the necessary skills to contribute to the existing codebases and develop new initiatives.
All the group’s code is open source, and so familiarity with open-source development processes is essential. A track record in system administration and the deployment of heterogenous hardware such as RISC-V boards would also be helpful.
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Informal enquiries should be directed to: Anil Madhavapeddy avsm2@cam.ac.uk
Please quote reference NR44995 on your application and in any correspondence about this vacancy.
The University actively supports equality, diversity and inclusion and encourages applications from all sections of society.
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Please refer the Job description for details