Cloud Platform Engineer for Destination Earth

We are in search of a highly motivated Cloud Platform Engineer to work on platform engineering and observability for application deployments in the Destination Earth Data Bridges. 

ECMWF is one of three organisations entrusted to deliver Destination Earth (DestinE), a flagship initiative of the European Commission to develop a highly accurate digital model of the Earth on a global scale. In the framework of ECMWF’s contribution to the initiative, you will support software deployments into the Destination Earth Data Bridges, a software stack running in multiple EuroHPC Cloud Computing environments. As part of this you will work closely with application and service developers in support of enhancing the capabilities of the DT warehouse part of the DestinE Data Bridges, in particular their system-level performance and observability.

At ECMWF, you will find a passionate community, collectively aiming to bring novel technology and science to the cutting-edge of numerical weather prediction and, more recently, to high-resolution climate modelling. In this role, you will develop the practices and knowledge gained from ECMWF’s own operations and support the deployment and observation of existing and new applications into multiple Data Bridge environments. You will be expected to bring creative insights which enable the operation of software in heterogeneous environments to a high degree of quality and reliability.

The role sits in the Platform Engineering team, within the Application Delivery Section of our Computing Department. The Section provides platforms and services that enable ECMWF teams to consume computing resources at different levels (PaaS, SaaS) and to consistently deploy applications with different levels of support to a high degree of quality and reliability.

The Section achieves this through innovation in the areas of computer systems administration automation, application deployment and operation, reliability engineering, identity and access management, container orchestration, observability (monitoring, logging, and tracing), and PaaS/SaaS application development.

This contract is funded by Destination Earth and will collaborate closely with other activities at ECMWF Member States and with our partners at ESA and EUMETSAT.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is a world-leader in weather and environmental forecasting. As an international organisation we serve our members and the wider community with global weather predictions and data that is critical for understanding and solving the climate crisis. We function as a 24/7 research and operational centre with a focus on medium and long-range predictions, holding one of the largest meteorological data archives in the world. The success of our activities builds on the talent of our scientists and experts, strong partnerships with 35 Member and Co-operating States and the international community, some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and the use of innovative technologies and ML across our operations. 

ECMWF has also developed a strong partnership with the European Union and has been entrusted with the implementation and operation of the Climate Change and Atmosphere Monitoring Services of the EU Copernicus Programme. We also contribute to the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. Other areas of work include High Performance Computing and the development of digital tools that enable ECMWF to extend provision of data and products covering weather, climate, air quality, fire and flood prediction and monitoring.

See  www.ecmwf.int for more info about what we do. 

ECMWF is one of the three entities entrusted to implement the DestinE initiative of the European Commission, alongside ESA and EUMETSAT as partners. DestinE aims to deploy several highly accurate thematic digital replicas of the Earth, called Digital Twins. The Digital Twins will help monitor and predict environmental change and human impact, in order to develop and test scenarios that support sustainable development and corresponding European policies for the Green Deal. ECMWF is responsible for the delivery of these digital twins and of the Digital Twin engine, the software infrastructure needed to power them of some of Europe’s largest supercomputers, those of the European HPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC). The second phase of DestinE covers the period June 2024 – May 2026, and future phases are foreseen (subject to funding). Phase 2 will focus on early operations with consolidation, maintenance, and continuous evolution of the DestinE system components developed in the first phase. There will also be an enhanced focus on ML activities, including the deployment of workflows of components of a ML model for the Earth system, optimisation of the Digital Twin Engine to enable efficient model training and simulations, and other activities.

For more information on DestinE, see https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/destination-earth-destine and https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/what-we-do/environmental-services/destination-earth

• Deliver and support a container orchestration infrastructure in multiple DestinE Data Bridges    
• Automation of the deployment of open source, commercial, and proprietary software to Destination Earth containers, VMs, or bare metal
• Developing observability capabilities for Destination Earth services and for the underlying systems
• Implement systems to monitor the performance of the Data Bridges PaaS / IaaS and interface with the providers and hosting data centres to ensure system-level capability and performance.
• Contribute to the design & implementation of observability and event collection and analysis
• Advocating for reliability engineering within Destination Earth and its partners
• Participating in regular 24-hour on-call rotas for any critical systems and services in the relevant areas

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with a co-operative nature
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a proactive continuous improvement approach
• Self-motivated, and able to work with minimal supervision
• Dedication and enthusiasm to work in a geographically distributed team 
• Ability to work efficiently and complete diverse tasks in a timely manner

• A university degree (EQF Level 6) or equivalent industry experience
• Experience in designing and developing Linux-based cloud-native platforms
• Experience in operational monitoring and application performance systems

Your knowledge and skills:

We encourage you to apply even if you don’t feel you meet precisely all of the these criteria.

Demonstrable knowledge and skills in some of the following:

• Programming (any language) or scripting (Python, Ruby, Perl, Go)
• Cloud Native and Containers (Kubernetes, Helm, Docker)
• Cloud IaaS (OpenStack, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or similar) 
• Software engineering - Kubernetes application patterns (operators) and Cloud Native architectures (distributed applications, microservices)
• Automation toolchain (Terraform, Ansible, or similar)
• Linux system administration
• Observability, monitoring, logging and analytics, tracing applications
• DevOps: CI/CD, Software Engineering, Automation pipelines
• The server, storage and networking components of Cloud applications

A working knowledge in some of the following is desirable:

• Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, ELK or similar
• Application Performance Monitoring
• NOSQL (MongoDB), SQL (PostgreSQL or MySQL)

Please provide clear examples of your knowledge and experience in the space provided on the application form.

Candidates must be able to work effectively in English and interviews will be conducted in English. A good knowledge of one of the Centre’s other working languages (French or German) is an advantage but not essential.

Grade remuneration:  The successful candidates will be recruited at the A2 grade, according to the scales of the Co-ordinated Organisations. The position is assigned to the employment category STF-PS  as defined in the ECMWF Staff Regulations. Full details of salary scales and allowances available on the ECMWF website at www.ecmwf.int/en/about/jobs. 

Starting date:  01 June 2024

Length of contract: The contract duration is expected to be two years. The DestinE initiative as per the Contribution Agreement is divided into phases, the second of which will last approximately two years from June 2024 to June 2026. There may be the possibility of further contract extensions in the future depending on requirements and funding availability.

Location: This position will be located at either one of ECMWF's duty stations in Reading, UK, or in Bologna, Italy. 

Candidates are expected to relocate to the duty station. As a multi-site organisation, ECMWF has adopted a hybrid organisation model which allows flexibility for staff to mix office working and teleworking, including working away from the duty station (within the area of our member states and co-operating states) for up to 10 working days per month.

Interviews by videoconference (MS Team) are expected to take place approximately a month after the closing date. 

Who can apply