Research Software Engineer

Research Software Engineer

Northern Arizona University

• This position is an on-site position which requires the incumbent to complete their work primarily at an NAU site, campus, or facility with or without accommodation. Opportunities for remote work are rare.
• This position is subject to the availability of funding. The incumbent is not eligible for Service Professional non-renewal notice, or Classified Staff layoff or recall status.

Northern Arizona University (NAU) is a Carnegie R1 university with over $77 million dollars in annual research expenditures. The School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) is known for its student-centered approach and strong emphasis on hands-on learning and research. Faculty and students engage in cutting-edge work in areas like AI, Robotics, and Microelectronics. We offer a variety of undergraduate and graduate degrees, offered by approximately 60 faculty in the school, with roughly 1,200 undergraduate and 500 graduate students.

The undergraduate Electrical and Computer Engineering degree programs are ABET-accredited. The department fosters close faculty-student interaction, with a focus on mentoring and collaborative research, partnering with local and national organizations to apply engineering solutions to real-world problems, especially those relevant to Arizona and the Southwest.

Faculty within the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems in beautiful Flagstaff, AZ are recruiting a dynamic Research Software Engineer to support multiple research projects focused around developing innovative software products that explore novel concepts in applied computing. The focus of these projects may vary over time as research interests and programs evolve. Examples of primary deliverables currently in development include novel cloud-based cyberinfrastructures that facilitate automation and collaboration around the forecasting of infectious disease for local and national communities.

The chosen candidate will work with Principal Investigators (lead research faculty) and senior Engineers in our labs to develop short- and long-term software and web-application development plans for each project, will support architecting solutions to realize those plans, and will help mentor a team of undergraduate and graduate research programmers and scientific assistants to produce key deliverables.

The successful candidate will be comfortable working with novel technologies and with the open-endedness and uncertainty that characterize research and development; and will be expected to contribute to a vibrant atmosphere of innovation and creative problem solving that drives computing research in our labs.

Primary Principal Investigators:
Dr. Joseph Mihaljevic joseph.mihaljevic
Dr. Eck Doerry eck.doerry

50% – Software Development

• Software architect support:
  Works with PIs to analyze needs, explore potential of various computing architectures/frameworks, and develop solution architectures.
• Analyze and write software functional and non-functional requirements, design specifications, manuals, and user’s guides.
• Develops code, develops modules, performs software unit testing, integrated testing, and usability testing.
• Designs, realizes, and maintains cloud-based cyberinfrastructure on AWS.
• Interacts with NAU's High Performance Computing team to integrate processing on HPC clusters, as needed.
• Assists in design and implementation of interactive visualizations of data.
• Follows the software development life cycle from early ideation, to prototype development, to production system, and through testing and deployment.
• Monitors for quality assurance, evaluates user feedback, and makes changes/upgrades as needed.
• Establishes and ensures proper codebase management, e.g., using Github.
• Review, modify and rewrite existing software to optimize it or adapt it to fit new requirements.

20% – Research

• Assists in finding novel computing solutions that apply data-intensive research to address real-world problems in innovative ways.
• Stays up-to-date with current trends in the software technologies, computing…