Research Software Engineer, Associate

Caltech is a world-renowned science and engineering institute that marshals some of the world's brightest minds and most innovative tools to address fundamental scientific questions. We thrive on finding and cultivating talented people who are passionate about what they do. Join us and be a part of the diverse Caltech community.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Software Engineer to develop, implement, and integrate components in an Earth system model (ESM) designed to learn from diverse Earth observations, with a focus on the land surface. As a Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) Research Software Engineer at Caltech, you will work in a dynamic, multi-disciplinary team of curious and creative scientists, engineers, and applied mathematicians, spanning the CliMA partner institutions.

Essential Job Duties

• Work on an ambitious, high-profile scientific project with an opportunity to impact the climate sciences worldwide.
• Use your expertise in Earth system science along with literature review to formulate mathematical models for land surface processes that are at a suitable level of complexity for simulating the Earth's surface for climate applications.
• Apply your expertise in computational science and your expertise in land surface processes to design and develop innovative software suitable for hardware with accelerators such as GPUs.
• Develop and implement innovative software solutions to problems in modeling the land surface and other climate model components.
• Follow best practices of software design and implementation, with a focus on collaborating with stakeholders to understand and meet key requirements, writing clear documentation, ensuring scalability with regards to the addition of new features, and ensuring code maintainability.
• Manage and contribute to software projects involving scientists, applied mathematicians, and engineers.
• Work in a friendly and diverse working environment, collaborating closely with researchers in climate science, machine learning, and applied mathematics.

Basic Qualifications

You are expected to have:

• Completed a PhD degree in a quantitative field such as computer science, applied mathematics, physics, or Earth science.
• Experience with at least two programming languages (e.g., C, C++, C#, Fortran, Python, Julia); and
• Experience developing large software projects in a distributed fashion, e.g., contributing to an open-source project with distributed contributors.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Earth science, applied mathematics, physics, or engineering.
• Experience working with high-performance computing systems, including multicore processors and GPUs or other accelerators.
• Demonstrated expertise in numerical methods for partial differential equations and/or machine learning and data analysis techniques, through coursework and/or research experience.
• Familiarity with the Julia language, including package development and performance optimization; and
• Experience working in multi-disciplinary teams and interacting cross-functionally with a wide variety of people.

 Required Documents

• Curriculum Vitae