Software Engineers

About

The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) is the central simulation and data processing facility for the German climate and Earth system modelling community and is one of the leading facilities in this area. DKRZ not only operates upercomputers in the highest performance class and one of the largest data and archive systems worldwide, we also participate in many national and international projects aiming to improve the software and infrastructure for climate modelling.

DKRZ is offering positions for people who want to help shape the future of climate data infrastructure and enable scientists to make full use of the coming wave of high-resolution climate model data generated in Germany and across Europe. The goal is to transform these data into robust, policy-relevant information for climate research, assessment, and decision-making. As we enter a new era of kilometer-scale climate modelling, major European flagship projects are redefining how scientific data can support IPCC assessments and inform international climate policy.

To support the development and operation of new climate model data exploitation services as part of several European projects, the Data Management and Data Analysis departments of DKRZ are looking for Software Engineers (all genders). In this role, you will help design, build, and operate cutting-edge data services that make vast volumes of climate model data - at the petabyte scale - accessible to the international climate science community. The focus of the position is on developing innovative data access and catalog services to provide seamless access to data across disk, cloud, and tape storage. At the core of this work is a centralized data catalog integrated into a globally federated data infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

• Federated Data Services: Develop and operate federated data catalogs based on standards such as STAC.
• Service Design & Deployment: Design, deploy, and maintain containerized data services in modern distributed environments.
• European Collaboration: Work closely with international partners to architect federated data services, including data catalogs integrated with message queues for ingestion and cloud-native data access services.
• Event-Driven Infrastructure: Implement and run event-driven systems with technologies such as Apache Kafka to enable efficient data flows across the European climate data infrastructure.
• Distributed Analysis Workflows: Design and build interactive and asynchronous analysis workflows on distributed computing infrastructure.
• Archive Access Services: Create and maintain asynchronous access layers for transparent retrieval of large-scale climate data from tape-based archives.
• Operations & Dev Ops: Strengthen service operations through centralized Dev Ops practices, including Docker-based deployments and CI/CD pipelines, to provide reusable components for international Tier sites.

Qualifications / Your Profile

• You have a university degree in Computer Science, Geoscience, or related field.
• You have a strong interest in modern technologies and innovative software.
• You have excellent, proven software engineering skills, especially in Python, scripting, and collaborative / open-source software development.
• You have hands-on experience with distributed systems and messaging technologies such as Apache Kafka.
• You bring practical knowledge in the deployment and operation of containerized services, for example with Docker.
• You are familiar with handling large-scale climate or geospatial datasets, including data formats such as NetCDF and Zarr.
• You have an understanding of data catalog and metadata systems, including concepts such as indexing, cataloguing, and STAC.
• You are motivated to explore and apply modern technologies in distributed climate data infrastructures, including S3 / cloud environments, Docker, Python-based AI and data analysis tools, and message queue systems.
• You enjoy working in an international team and are open to travel.
• You have strong communication skills in English; German is a plus.
• You are a team player with…