About the Job

The Cloud Developer Advocate III is responsible for enabling and enhancing the ability for research scientists to conduct data analyses using our cloud-hosted data sets and services. To fulfill this role, the Advocate must work with both external researchers, and internal engineering and engagement teams.

They directly support researchers by helping them design analysis workflows that are well-fit to our platform. They advocate for these research-oriented needs by helping internal teams design solutions that support research use cases.

The Advocate must be fluent with the organizations’ data discovery and access mechanisms and data flow aspects that affect research use cases. The Advocate participates in, and may lead, projects and engagement activities to fulfill these responsibilities. The ability to communicate effectively with a variety of research scientists and internal teams is an essential requirement.

The Advocate creates on-boarding material to assist researchers in transitioning their computation needs to cloud environments. They ensure technical solutions comply with best practices for scalability, reliability, usability, and reproducibility. They must be proactive about informing researchers who may possess a broad range of technical awareness of the capabilities, limitations, costs, and other specifics of doing research analysis in a cloud environment.

The Advocate must have a strong background in cloud computing, and a variety of approaches for performing data analysis. They must stay current on industry best practices and emerging data processing strategies and leverage that knowledge to improve workflow and system designs.

Job Responsibilities

General Essential Job Duties:

• Communicate with researchers to understand their data analysis requirements.
• Collaborate with researchers to design options for their analysis needs in cloud environments.
• Design, develop, implement, and support cloud-based data analysis workflows that serve as examples to researchers working adjacent to and with data sets we offer.
• Advocate for the cloud onboarding and capability needs of external researchers within internal engineering and engagement teams.
• Lead projects that include researchers and potentially other staff members to develop solutions for research computation.
• Lead or participate in research community engagement activities such as workshops and conference sessions.
• Contribute to the development of software system requirements.
• Create complete plans for software development projects to meet requirements.
• Communicate with internal stakeholders to establish requirements and implement feedback for project groups, which can include external researchers.
• Coordinate with other team members to ensure tasks are completed on time with best practices applied.
• Write organized and comprehensive documentation on projects.
• Apply the Software Development Life Cycle to projects.
• Work directly with others in functional or project groups to debug and resolve issues with software programs.
• Assist teams with defining strategic directions and promoting standards for functional and project groups.
• Other duties may be assigned as necessary for the successful operation of the business.

Leadership and Supervisory Responsibilities:

• This position does not have supervisory responsibility.
• Interact effectively and efficiently with EarthScope staff, community and partnering organizations.
• Foster a professional culture through the use of strong interpersonal skills, verbal and written communications.
• Communicate clearly and effectively with other team members to ensure tasks are completed on time and with best practices.

Skills & Experience

Minimum Education & Experience Requirements:

• Master’s degree or equivalent professional experience in Computer Science, Information Systems or related STEM field at time of hire.
• Including one (1) years of post-education experience in software development.

OR

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience in Computer Science, Information Systems or related STEM field at time of hire.
• Including three (3) years of post-education experience in software development.

OR

• At least seven (7) years of practical software development experience.
• Including three (3) years of experience equivalent to a Cloud Software Engineer II.

Preferred Skills:

• 4 years of practical cloud system and software development experience.
• 1 years of demonstrated work supporting the computation needs of research scientists.

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability for the position:

• Ability to communicate effectively with research scientists, technical engineering teams, and engagement teams, and to translate the requirements and information between these groups.
• Ability to understand the data analysis needs of research scientists and design compute, in collaboration, options to satisfy the needs in a cloud environment.
• Understanding of web technologies (HTTP), cloud databases (MongoDB/DocumentDB, PostgreSQL/AWS Aurora) and familiarity with Linux, preferred.
• Knowledge of networking; working with VPNs and building secure networks, configuring connectivity between local networks and cloud environments using best practices, preferred.
• Understanding of systems, data structures, modern scripting and enterprise level languages like Python, Java, etc., and open- source tools that can and should be leveraged to solve problems.
• Experience with Agile practices (continuous integration, test driven development, pair programming, etc.).
• Experience implementing projects with design patterns, service-oriented architecture, and RESTful web services development, preferred.
• Experience with software containerization (e.g., Docker).
• Disciplined approach to quality engineering via automated testing (e.g., Pytest, JUnit, etc.).
• Ability to take initiative to learn new skills, current best practices and technologies and then apply these to projects while encouraging them throughout the organization.
• Experience building and deploying cloud-like operational environments and networks.

Other Requirements:

• Appropriate availability consistent with EarthScope established practices and norms; hours may exceed 40 hours per week on occasion, particularly when traveling.

Physical Setting and Requirements:

• Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.