Senior Platform Engineer

About The Department

BSD CTD
- Platform Engineering
- PlanX

The Center for Translational Data Science (CTDS) at the University of Chicago is a research center whose mission is to develop the discipline of translational data science to impactful problems in biology, medicine, healthcare, and the environment. We envision a world in which researchers have ready access to the data needed and the tools required to make data‑driven discoveries that increase our scientific knowledge and improve the quality of life.

We architect ecosystems of large‑scale commons of research data, computing resources, applications, tools, and services for the broader research community to use data at scale to pursue scientific inquiry and accelerate discovery.

The job performs a variety of activities relating to software support and/or development: analysis, design, development, debugging, and modification of computer code for end user applications, beta general releases, web pages, and production support.

The Senior Platform Engineer provides production support, production monitoring, CI/CD design & implementation, and security automation across the open‑source software platforms CTDS develops and operates for translational data science. Production support includes triaging, researching, communicating, and addressing production incidents. Monitoring involves wrangling disparate system monitoring assets and developing common analytics to inform optimization, define benchmarks and confidence intervals, and forecast, proactively mitigating production incidents.

CI/CD pipelines support a hybrid cloud architecture on‑premises and in commercial cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

This at‑will position is wholly or partially funded by contractual grant funding which is renewed under provisions set by the grantor of the contract. Employment will be contingent upon the continued receipt of these grant funds and satisfactory job performance.

• Responsible for technical tasks and timely delivery of such tasks, meeting the required level of quality.
• Participation in complex and challenging activities, including design and implementation.
• Provide support and maintenance for existing applications.
• Provide technical mentorship to interns and onboarding staff and technical leadership in technical initiatives.
• Actively participate in the hiring process and provide fair and productive interview feedback.
• Elaborate on technical solutions internally and externally when required.
• Investigate, analyze and resolve day‑to‑day technical problems using standard procedures.
• Work with stakeholders to gather and analyze requirements for developmental programs; receive a moderate level of guidance to design applications to meet University and business requirements.
• Perform code testing on components and work to ensure that appropriate implementation standards are met. Evaluate design alternatives for development cost and solutions using various methods.
• Support and maintain existing applications; work with web developers and respond to requests from users.
• Perform other related work as needed.

Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in a related field.

Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 2–5 years of work experience in a related job discipline.

• Advanced degree in computer science, mathematics, statistics, engineering, or a relevant quantitative field strongly preferred.
• 3+ years experience developing infrastructure, configuration and/or deployment automation or demonstrated skills and qualifications through projects, initiatives, or outstanding performance.
• Hands‑on scripting experience in Bash, Python, or other dynamic language.
• Unix/Linux programming or system administration experience.
• Experience with Open Stack and AWS (EC2/S3) cloud technologies.
• Experience with configuration management utilities (Chef, Puppet, Ansible).
• Experience with F5 or other load balancing technologies (Nginx, AWS ELB/ALB, etc.).
• Experience with source control and build systems (SVN, Git, Jenkins, etc.).
• Experience with container‑based…