Reliability Engineer

Your role

We are in search of a highly motivated reliability engineer to work in the Service Reliability team of the Application Delivery section at ECMWF. In this role, you will support some of ECMWF’s most essential platform services in the areas of observability and identity and access management.

The role requires experience of both IT systems and software development with a focus on maintaining effective operations. Key skills include cloud native, automation, IT observability and service and application performance monitoring, logging and analytics.

Our reliability engineers engage with, advise, steer and support services relevant to the lifecycle of application deployment and hosting, including technical strategy, design, infrastructure, software development, tooling, service transition, service operation and use.

Day-to-day, you will be working as a bridge between the ECMWF Computing Department, in-house and community system/service providers and application developers, and your technical peers of our WEkEO partners (EUMETSAT, Mercator Ocean, and EEA) advocating good practice and building a greater understanding of architecture and design to enable reliable and performant operations of the WEkEO distributed platform.

About the Section/Team 

The role sits in the Service Reliability 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.

Within the Section, the Service Reliability Team is responsible for IT observability, service monitoring, configuration management, centralised logging and analytics, identity and access management, and helping services to run reliably and with good performance.

About ECMWF

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 machine learning across our operations. ECMWF is a multi-site organisation, with a main office in Reading, UK, a data centre/supercomputer in Bologna, Italy, and a large presence in Bonn, Germany.  

ECMWF has also developed a strong partnership with the European Union and has been entrusted with the implementation and operation of the Destination Earth Initiative and the Climate Change and Atmosphere Monitoring Services of the Copernicus Programme. Other areas of work include High Performance Computing (HPC) 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. 

For additional detail about ECMWF, see www.ecmwf.int  

About Copernicus

Copernicus is the flagship Earth-observation component of EU’s space programme, which through operational monitoring of the atmosphere, oceans, and continental surfaces, provides validated environmental data, products, documentation and tools for anyone to use on a full, free and open basis. Exploiting space-based and in-situ observations and models, Copernicus consists of six information services, covering: land, marine, atmospheric and climate monitoring, as well as emergency management and security. ECMWF has been entrusted to operate two of these Services – the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) – on behalf of the European Commission for a second term, until the end of 2027.

For details see https://www.copernicus.eu/en

Main duties and key responsibilities

• Developing and supporting observability platforms for services and their underlying systems
• Developing and supporting identity and access management (IAM) platforms for services
• Advocating for reliability engineering within ECMWF, WEkEO, and Copernicus partners
• Developing observability capabilities for WEkEO services and the underlying systems 
• Contributing to federated IAM including liaising with technical peers at WEkEO partners
• Deploying open source, commercial, and proprietary software to containers, VMs, or bare metal
• Contributing to documentation and training, including cross-training within the team
• Participating in regular 24-hour on-call rotas for critical services in the relevant areas
• Any other relevant domains related to the team’s portfolio

What we’re looking for

• 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

Education

• A university degree (EFQ Level 6 or above) or equivalent industry experience 

Experience required in the following areas

• Demonstrated relevant professional experience
• Experience in configuring network, server and storage infrastructures
• Experience in operational monitoring and application performance systems
• Experience in Identity and access management systems
• Experience in designing and developing in Linux-based Cloud environment
• This role would suit IT professionals with either a software development or IT Operations background

Knowledge and skills

We encourage you to apply even if you don’t feel you meet precisely all these criteria. In particular, we welcome applications from candidates with other technical/computing backgrounds to join this multi-disciplinary team.

Demonstrable knowledge and skills in some of the following:

• Programming (any language) or scripting (Python, Ruby, Perl, Go)
• Observability, monitoring, logging and analytics, tracing applications
• General Linux system administration
• Cloud Native (Kubernetes, Docker)
• Cloud IaaS (Terraform, VMware, OpenStack, Amazon, Google)
• 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(influxdb or others TSDB), SQL (PostgreSQL or MySQL)
• Identity and Access Management (e.g. OpenID Connect, SAML)
• Microsoft Active Directory
• Use of git version control

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 required. 

Other information

Grade remuneration    The successful candidate will be recruited at the A2 grade, according to the scales of the Co-ordinated Organisations. ECMWF also offers a generous benefits package, including a flexible teleworking policy. The position is assigned to the employment category STF-C or STF-PL, 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, including the ECMWF Staff Regulations and the terms and conditions of employment.

Starting date:               As soon as possible 

Contract duration:       For STF-C:  4 years   or for STF-PL: Approx. 3.5 years to 30 Sept 2028 

Location:                         Bologna, Italy   (Candidates are expected to relocate to the duty station)

As a multi-site organisation, ECMWF has adopted a hybrid working model that allows flexibility to staff to mix office working and teleworking. We allow for remote work 10 days/month away from the office, including up to 80 days/year away from the duty station country (within the area of our member states and co-operating states).

Successful applicants and members of their family forming part of their households will be exempt from immigration restrictions.

Interviews will take place via videoconference (MS Team).  If you require any special accommodations in order to participate fully in our recruitment process, please contact us via email:  [email protected]

Who can apply 

Applicants are invited to complete the online application form by clicking on the apply button below. 

At ECMWF, we consider an inclusive environment as key for our success. We are dedicated to ensuring a workplace that embraces diversity and provides equal opportunities for all, without distinction as to race, gender, age, marital status, social status, disability, sexual orientation, religion, personality, ethnicity and culture. We value the benefits derived from a diverse workforce and are committed to having staff that reflect the diversity of the countries that are part of our community, in an environment that nurtures equality and inclusion. 

Applications are invited from nationals from ECMWF Member States and Cooperating States (for STF-C), listed below, as well as from all EU Member States (for STF-PL):

ECMWF Member and Co-operating States are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, North Macedonia, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

In these exceptional times, we also welcome applications from Ukrainian nationals for this vacancy.  

Applications from nationals from other countries may be considered in exceptional cases.