Scientific Platform Engineer
RemoteMassachusetts, United States
Job Summary
Design and implement CI pipelines for scientific software across macOS and Linux, developing regression and smoke test harnesses to catch failures before distribution. Help define a canonical build contract, improve dependency tracking, and enable deterministic rebuilds while contributing to artifact integrity and metadata tracking. Add tests and versioning discipline to the runtime wrapper system, introduce feature flags for safer rollouts, and develop dashboards to reduce reliance on tribal knowledge. This 90% project/building role focuses on modernizing, securing, and hardening the SBGrid platform for structural biology and cryo-EM research.
Required Qualifications
- Minimum of five years' post-secondary education or relevant work experience
- Minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in platform engineering, systems engineering, DevOps, build/release engineering, research computing infrastructure, or a closely related area
- Two or more years of professional software development experience
- Experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, similar)
- Experience with an Infrastructure-as-Code tool (e.g. Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Terraform, etc)
- Comfortable with Linux internals and scripting in Bash
- Experience debugging cross-platform build or runtime issues
- Solid programming skills in at least one interpreted language (Python preferred, Javascript, Ruby, etc)
- Comfort working in a remote, documentation-driven environment
- Experience with HPC environments or research computing
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Singularity/Apptainer, similar)
- Experience with artifact signing or supply-chain tooling
- Experience working in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments
- Interest in scientific research software ecosystems
- Strong engineering discipline and curiosity matter
- This is a 1-year term position from the date of hire, with the possibility of extension, contingent upon work performance and continued funding to support the position
- Standard Hours/Schedule: 35 hours per week
- Remote candidates must be available to work during Eastern Standard Time (EST) business hours
- Harvard University is unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position
Desired Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field
- Experience with Linux (expert-level): shells, process model, filesystems, toolchains, debugging, perf basics
- Experience with macOS (strong): building, testing, and release workflows across Intel + Apple Silicon
- Experience with Go and/or Rust (selectively, for the hot paths)
- Current + future packaging direction: evaluating/adopting Nix/Spack/Homebrew-style approaches
- Dependency management, artifact metadata, caching, provenance, reproducible builds
- Containers and virtualization: Docker/Podman, VMs, and orchestration concepts (framework-agnostic; Kubernetes/OpenShift not required)
- (Nice-to-have) Apptainer/Singularity in scientific/HPC contexts
- AWS familiarity (useful, not required)
- Git, code review workflows, testing discipline, documentation-first habits
- Nice-to-have context Research/HPC exposure (Slurm, shared filesystems, scientific software stacks)
- Strong engineering discipline and curiosity matter
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