26-117: Fire Weather Testbed Cloud Developer

Job Description Description of Unit:
The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University (CSU) seeks to fill a full-time Cloud Developer position designed to conduct collaborative research with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) located at the Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) in Boulder, CO. The individual in this position will work in the NOAA/OAR/GSL Weather Informatics and Decision Support (WIDS) Division’s Fire Weather Testbed (FWT).

This position will be responsible for setting up and maintaining cloud applications and solutions to support FWT experiments, including installing experimental software packages and data sources. The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University (CSU) is a multi-million-dollar research organization located on CSU's Foothills Campus in Fort Collins, Colorado. CIRA is a cooperative institute (CI) that is also a research department within CSU's College of Engineering, in partnership with the Department of Atmospheric Science.

Its vision is to conduct interdisciplinary research in the atmospheric sciences by entraining skills beyond the meteorological disciplines, exploiting advances in engineering and computer science, facilitating transitional activity between pure and applied research, leveraging both national and international resources and partnerships, and assisting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), CSU, the State of Colorado, and the Nation through the application of our research to areas of societal benefit.

NOAA's Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) is a federal science and research laboratory under NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. GSL provides the National Weather Service (NWS) and the nation with environmental observation, prediction, computer, visualization, and information systems. These systems deliver data, forecasts, and predictions of weather, including severe weather events, within the next few minutes to weeks away.

GSL is a leader in the applied research, directed development, and technology transfer of environmental data, models, products, and services that enhance environmental understanding with the outcome of supporting commerce, protecting life and property, and promoting a scientifically literate public. Housed at GSL, the FWT is a NOAA testbed dedicated to serving the wildfire communities through pursuing improvements to fire weather forecasting and decision support services.

These improvements will be achieved by connecting stakeholders and their information needs to the scientific research and development communities. The FWT is a physical and virtual environment designed to bring the wildfire community together, with an end goal of a safer society and healthier environment achieved through scientific and technological advances. Numerous experiments will be conducted in the FWT and will include a broad spectrum of science fields including atmospheric, geophysical, hydrologic, and environmental sciences as well as social and behavioral sciences.

This is a full time position, funded for two years, and an option to renew contingent upon satisfactory performance and available funding . The individual in this position will help design, develop, test, and refine applications in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud architecture for the FWT. The FWT is a team that conducts experiments testing the readiness of prototype fire weather tools and software for operational implementation.

In addition to setting up and maintaining the cloud environments, this individual will work with outside organizations to install their tools and software for testing and, where necessary, assist in implementing and developing the FWT cloud platform. This includes working with various operating systems, meteorological and environmental data sources, and third‑party software packages. The individual in this position will ensure the availability of installed software during FWT experiments.

This position reports to the Sr Software Engineer.

• Technical Leadership & Cloud Architecture:
  Develop, implement, and maintain the FWT’s cloud architecture. Take the lead on software requests from the FWT team, suggesting architectural design changes to improve cloud implementations.
• Data Retrieval & UI/UX Integration:
  Build full-stack mechanisms to retrieve, parse, and seamlessly integrate meteorological and environmental datasets into intuitive UI/UX platforms for scientific research and model verification.
• System Deployment & Security:
  Collaborate with systems