2023-11-20 12:00

Ref0119 / Deadline: January 18th, 2024 (23:59 CET)

Cerrado/Closed

Offer description

The Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA) invites applications for a scientific software engineer position (also known as research software engineer) to start as soon as possible. The position, will be for a duration of at least 2 years; within the framework of the "Knowledge Generation Projects 2022" project PID2022-138896NA-C54 titled "ARRAKIHS: First phase of the next mission of the European Space Agency".

ARRAKIHS (Analysis of Resolved Remnants of Accreted galaxies as a Key Instrument for Halo Surveys) was recently approved as the next European Space Agency (ESA) F-class mission (F is for "fast"). It is the first ESA mission to be led by Spain and is planned for launch around 2030. ARRAKIHS will observe ~100 Milky Way-like galaxies in the optical and infrared, with the objective of unveiling the nature of dark matter and to deepen our knowledge of galaxy formation processes through deep observations.

CEFCA is a research institution located in Teruel, Spain, in charge of the operation, data management and scientific exploitation of the Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ), an astronomical facility specifically suited for carrying out large astronomical surveys with very large field-of-view (FoV) telescopes: the 2.5m Javalambre Survey Telescope (JST250; 3deg diameter FoV) and the 83cm Javalambre Auxiliary Survey Telescope (JAST80; 2deg diameter FoV). A replica of ARRAKIHS will also be installed at OAJ in the coming years to help in planning the ARRAKIHS hardware calibration, pipeline and science. CEFCA is leading several key aspects of ARRAKIHS: ground-based demonstrator assembly and operations, the data reduction pipeline of the Science Ground Segment (SGS), and Science Work Package 10 (structural analysis of galaxies in the high-level products).

As the pipeline engineer of ARRAKIHS, the successful applicant will become a member of the ARRAKIHS consortium, actively participating in the SGS, consortium meetings and will be visiting other participant institutions for short visits: primarily IFCA/Santander and ESAC/Madrid; and based on need: UCM/Madrid, IAA/Granada, EPFL/Lausanne, Univ. Lund/Sweden, Univ. Innsbruck/Austria.

ARRAKIHS is a long-term project (with a final data release about 2035).

The successful candidate will join the Data Processing and Archiving Department at CEFCA.

Role/Function

Pipeline software engineer for ARRAKIHS

The successful applicant will be in charge of the low-level implementation of the ARRAKIHS data reduction pipeline; under the supervision of Dr. Mohammad Akhlaghi (ARRAKIHS and OAJ pipeline scientist). The pipeline will retrieve single exposure and uncalibrated images from the ESA archive and will return high-level science-ready deep images (a combination of many calibrated single exposures). Before the ARRAKIHS launch (in 2030), the pipeline will be developed using simulated single-exposure images (provided by other science work packages within the consortium), as well as data from the ground-based demonstrator at the OAJ once it is setup.

The low-level (number crunching) will be done with GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro, an official GNU package: https://gnu.org/s/gnuastro; written in C). The high-level workflow will be using Maneage (https://maneage.org; written in Shell/Makefile). If any necessary feature is lacking, or bugs are found in Gnuastro or Maneage, the successful applicant will also implement/fix them (and publish the implementation). Therefore experience in C programming, Bash scripting, Makefiles and Git version control are critical for this job. The pipeline will be free software (GNU LGPL v3+), and will be published with each ARRAKIHS data release.

It is expected that the successful candidate will also contribute to the general pipeline used for the processing of OAJ telescopes images (including those from the ARRAKIHS demonstrator to be installed at the OAJ) at least in those aspects that fit with the implementations being done for the ARRAKIHS pipeline.

Evaluation criteria

In the CV, please clearly highlight links to the points below (for example on Github, Gitlab, GNU Savannah or any other code project management server) so they can be objectively verified during evaluation. If the items below (code or issue tracker discussions) were not done in free and open source software projects that can be publicly available with a URL, you can attach a readable screenshot of each at the end of your CV. All submitted code examples are only used for evaluation and nothing else.

1. Coding experience
   1. Contributed to, or maintained software written in C.
      • Free and open-source (FOSS) are a major advantage.
   2. Following coding conventions (for example GNU Coding Standards; if not GNU, please specify in CV which coding conventions were used in each contributed project).
   3. Specify two C functions which you have written/contributed-to and are most proud of: describe what makes them unique from your presepective in terms of design, implementation, optimization, algorithm, or etc.
2. Documentation
   1. Good documentation within the code and outside of it (for example manual/webpage).
3. Team work
   1. Specify the number of active developers in the software projects you have worked on.
   2. Give at least two examples of your best discussions with colleagues (including date) in the formal issue-tracking services your projects used in your CV.
   3. Give at least two examples of interchanges with users of the software you have developed.

Requirements and conditions