Monitoring Infrastructure Engineer

Company Description
At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. Using the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments, they study the basic constituents of matter - fundamental particles that are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives physicists clues about how particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. Find out more on http://home.cern.

Job Description
Introduction

Take an active role in the Development and Operations of the Monitoring service for the CERN Data Centres and for the World-wide LHC Grid Infrastructure! The unified monitoring infrastructure is fully deployed and managed at CERN by the Monitoring team and is based on established open source technologies, such as Collectd, Kafka, Spark, ElasticSearch, HDFS, InfluxDB and Grafana. Join our IT department as Monitoring Infrastructure Engineer! CERN, take part!

You will join:

The Compute and Monitoring (CM) group which provides compute resources, schedulers and monitoring to support efficient usage of over 280,000 computing cores at the CERN data centres. More information on the group is at: http://information-technology.web.cern.ch/about/organisation/compute-monitoring
The Monitoring and Messaging section (MM), responsible for providing (1) a unified monitoring infrastructure monitoring of the resources of the CERN Data Centre and of activities of the WLCG world-wide grid infrastructure (2) a CERN-wide messaging service used by major project and service in the Laboratory.
More information on IT the Department is at: http://information-technology.web.cern.ch/.

Functions

As a Monitoring Infrastructure Engineer in the IT-CM group, you will contribute to the development, operations of the CERN unified monitoring and alarms infrastructure across a wide range of platforms and technologies needed to stream, analyse and store metrics collected, with a frequency of 100k metrics/sec, from:

the CERN Data Centres compute and storage resources (e.g. 35k VMs, more than 8k hosts).
the WLCG activities for data transfers, jobs execution and resources availability on more than 300 grid sites.

Your main activities will consist of:

Participation to the operations, development and improvement of the Monitoring service.
User support on monitoring for other IT services and joining the regular support rota for the IT and WLCG users.
Advice and solution design to IT service managers and LHC experiments staff on the use of the unified monitoring infrastructure and of the monitoring data.
Daily management of the monitoring services which includes third level service user support, deployment of software packages, operation of the service with verification of performance and security.
Automation using Agile/DevOps tools such as Puppet to support monitoring within the standard CERN IT procedures.
Interaction and contribution to Open Source communities such and Grafana, Prometheus and Collectd.
Definition, documentation and implementation of procedures following the standards of the IT Department.
Close collaboration with other IT groups, departments and physics experiments at CERN.
Qualifications
Master's degree or equivalent relevant experience in the field of Computer Science or a related field.

Experience:

Proven experience in software development, with knowledge of established open source technologies such as Collectd, Prometheus, Kafka, Spark, ElasticSearch, InfluxDB and Grafana.
Managing large scale server deployments in a complex environment such as OpenStack cloud services or virtualisation systems such as KVM.
Performing automation tasks using scripting languages such as Python and deploying services using configuration system solutions such as Puppet.
Analysis of performance to scale them to the monitoring infrastructure to an ever-growing world load.

Technical competencies:

Administration of computing systems: deliver and support properly-engineered IT services and products to meet the needs of CERN.
Architecture and design of ICT systems: analyse sub-optimum procedures, streamline and document new ones; optimisation of existing tools and selection of the most appropriate one for a given process.
Change management: coordination of changes within and outside the group.
Continuity and availability management: organisation of large scale deployments in a complex environment.

Behavioural competencies:

Achieving results: delivering prompt and efficient service taking into account customer needs.
Solving problems: producing workable and timely solutions that meet requirements.
Learning and sharing knowledge: creating or participating in forums to exchange experience, comparing techniques and learn from others.
Demonstrating flexibility: demonstrating a willingness to accept changing circumstances; supporting initiatives for change.
Working in teams: building and maintaining constructive and effective work relationships.
Language skills:

Spoken and written English: ability to draw-up technical specifications, documentation and/or scientific reports.
Basic knowledge of French or an undertaking to acquire it rapidly.
Additional Information
Eligibility and closing date:

Diversity has been an integral part of CERN's mission since its foundation and is an established value of the Organization. Employing a diverse workforce is central to our success. We welcome applications from all Member States and Associate Member States.

This vacancy will be filled as soon as possible, and applications should normally reach us no later than 16.01.2020

Employment Conditions

Contract type: Limited duration contract (5 years). Subject to certain conditions, holders of limited-duration contracts may apply for an indefinite position.

These functions require:

Work during nights, Sundays and official holidays, when required by the needs of the Organization.
Stand-by duty, when required by the needs of the Organization.
Job grade: 6-7

Job reference: IT-CM-MM-2019-136-LD

Benchmark Job Title: Computing Engineer

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