Research Assistant (Software Engineer)'

Overview

We are looking for people with a strong background in Computation & data infrastructure and/or building data systems. They must be comfortable working with a range of stakeholders and functional teams including Students, Faculty, IT, and External Collaborators. The right candidate will have a passion for working with numerous small research teams to assist in managing their infrastructure needs and advise them on best practices to engineer their projects efficiently.

Responsibilities

INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT (50%):
• Maintain servers, including file, web, and proxy servers, including security patches.
• Allocation of compute/storage resources as needed.
• Analyze institute infrastructure needs to implement improvements to systems.
• Management of the Institute Website.
• Liaise with Global IT teams to ensure compliance with their policies and be a single point of contact for the institute for troubleshooting.
• Manage recording and streaming systems during regular seminars, conferences, and workshops.

DATA ENGINEERING (25%):
• Support research teams with advice on efficient data engineering practices including automation of data pipelines, data cleansing, integrity checks, etc.
• Develop processes to handle remote data access/management in compliance with security best practices (and appropriate policies).
• Assess the effectiveness and accuracy of new data sources and data gathering techniques.

SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT (25%):
• Create APIs to integrate data sources into functional blocks of software & services.
• Create APIs for downstream usage of data models.
• Coordinate with different functional teams to implement models and monitor outcomes.
• Promote security best practices for application development.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Operations Research, or Engineering with more than 3 years of relevant experience.
• Experience in maintaining virtualized server infrastructure and creative problem-solving within large IT infrastructure.
• Deep understanding of statistical analysis, data mining, or machine learning.
• Practical experience in working with large structured and unstructured data sets.
• Ability to think analytically and deliver results that drive business decision-making.
• Team player to build strong partnerships.
• Competency in one or more of the programming languages or tools: Python, R, Spark.
• Experience in security engineering will be a plus.
• Experience or knowledge in AWS/GCP environment will be a plus.
• Prepared to take on new challenges and ad-hoc requests that need a quick turn-around.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for coordinating across teams.