System Engineer / System Administrator with focus on Research Data Management (f/m) – Open Position

To support teaching and research, IT Services (ITS) of ETH Zurich are working as a service organization in a large and complex IT environment. Scientific IT Services (SIS, a section of ITS) aims at bridging the gap between computational research and IT service and infrastructure provisioning and provide a stimulating, flexible and family-friendly working environment. The Scientific IT Services of ETH Zurich (SIS) are working closely together with ETH researchers to provide support in the wide areas of scientific computing, data management and analysis, development of scientific software, in addition to operating high-performance and cloud computing infrastructures.

To strengthen our team of experts for the engineering, provisioning and operation of our research IT platforms, SIS is looking for a System engineer / System administrator with focus on Research Data Management (f/m).

This position will be part of a growing team of expert system engineers and system administrators that ensure engineering, development and operation of customer-tailored data management systems (e.g. openBIS), data analysis workflows, and data science IT platforms for various scientific domains.

Your primary focus will be engineering and operating research data management solutions, based on our in-house developed Open Source software platform openBIS, for a large number of research laboratories; your tasks will range from devising end-to-end solutions to meet customer’s use cases and needs, to ensuring day-to-day operation of the provided services, to incident handling, to constantly improving the automation and the efficiency of the support infrastructure. Experimenting with new technologies from proof of concept to full production, will also be an integral and crucial part of your role. The interaction with the development team will be established in a DevOps mode.

This position requires a proven experience in service operation in production environments. You must be an experienced Linux system administrator: you are familiar with networking and containerized deployment, and have experience in automating complex, repetitive tasks using Bash or Python scripts. You should demonstrate experience in configuration management and application deployment systems (such as Ansible, CFEngine, Puppet, etc.). Good knowledge of incident management, monitoring tools, process automation, fail-over, and disaster recovery is required. Experience with and interest in Open Source software development is a plus. Beside solid technical abilities, this position also requires 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 and domain experts are necessary.

The contract is initially for 1 year with the possibility of further extension. Upon successful completion of a customer on-boarding project, it is planned to make the position permanent.

Interested?