POSITION: Software engineer in verification of seasonal forecasts

JOB DESCRIPTION:

About BSC

BSC-CNS (Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) is the National Supercomputing Facility in Spain and was officially constituted in April 2005. BSC-CNS manages MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, located at the Torre Girona chapel. The mission of BSC-CNS is to investigate, develop and manage information technology in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof and currently has over 400 staff from 41 countries. To get an idea of what its like to work at the BSC take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRkEii7OzRE

Context and Mission

The candidate will join the QA4Seas development team within the Computational Earth Sciences group. QA4Seas, which stands for quality assessment for seasonal forecasts, is a project that aims at designing and implementing a prototype of an operational system for verification of seasonal forecasts produced in the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Basing on existing state-of-art tools, the main goal is to provide scalable and efficient mechanisms to compute quality measurements, with visualisation tools and with metadata being a key element. Documentation on suggestions, considerations and steps to develop such a prototype must be provided also.

Key Duties

• Developing in a collaborative R project.
• Analysing state of art R tools, in terms of performance and usability, to take into account in the design of the prototype.
• Developing efficient atomic forecast score functions.
• Developing easy to use functions that receive R objects with plenty of metadata as inputs and apply other smaller functions.
• Developing visualisation functions.

Requirements

• Education
  • Having a Bachelor degree in Computer Science, Telecommunications, Physics, Mathematics or related discipline. Having a Master’s or PhD degrees will be valued.

• Knowledge
• Previous experience in C, R or other interpreted languages is required.
• Experience of version control in a distributed team, including SVN or Git.

• Professional Experience
• Previous experience in scientific R packages will be valued.
• Previous experience in HPC architectures and parallel programming (multi-threaded applications) will be valued.
• Previous experience in a scientific area related to the research position, in particular climate or ocean modeling will be valued.

• Competences
  • Capacity to interact and build strong relations with both climate and computer scientists.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  • Ability to take initiatives, prioritize the tasks and work under set deadlines.
  • Ability to work both independently and within a team.
  • Ability to learn and adapt to multiple programming languages easily.

Conditions

The position will be located at BSC within the Earth Sciences Department and start as soon as possible. The contract will be for at least one year, which could be extended depending on availability of funds and performance.

Applications Procedure

All applications must include:

• A motivation letter.
• A full CV including contact details.

Diversity and Equal Opportunity Employment

BSC-CNS is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We are pleased to consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or any other basis protected by applicable state or local law.