Control System software developer -2 year

Lund University was founded in 1666 and is repeatedly ranked among the world’s top 100 universities. The University has 42 000 students and 7 400 staff based in Lund, Helsingborg and Malmö. We are united in our efforts to understand, explain and improve our world and the human condition.

MAX IV is a national large-scale research laboratory providing scientists from Sweden and the rest of the world with instruments for research in areas such as materials science, structural biology, chemistry and nanotechnology. Fully developed it will receive more than 2 000 scientists annually. 200 people are currently employed at the MAX IV Laboratory.

The MAX IV Controls and IT team deliver solutions to the whole MAX IV organisation in the areas of control system hardware, controls software applications, infrastructure and networking, information management and scientific software. This is a dynamic and highly challenging environment and requires close collaboration with the staff in order to understand the needs and be effective in forming solutions. We are around 30 people in total who work in 5 domains in a well organised and agile way. We hold values of lean management, knowledge spread, user autonomy, continuous improvement and flexibility as guiding principles for our work.

The control and acquisition system software is an very important part of MAX IV and will continuously develop to increase the functionality and the reliability of the whole facility to meet the research.

The number of beamlines will continue to grow as the revolutionary accelerator reaches its full performance.

Motivation

Are you the new software developer that will boost research for scientists? Apply your software engineering skills to help exploit the full capabilities of Sweden's new flagship laboratory.
You will have the chance to face new challenges of the synchrotron domain in a very distributive environment, i.e fast detector read out, real time beam alignment, innovative user interfaces, continuous data acquisition or streaming of big data. 

By having close contact to the users you will have the opportunity to solve the problem with a new approach, to become involved in writing an interesting paper and to present the work at international conferences.
As a professional you will bridge science and state of the art software development. You will help to maintain a community and support the researcher to be autonomous in software development. Being part of the KITS group means to participate to different international collaborations about control and acquisition, Scandinavian and European, Scientific or Industrial.
As a team mate you will join a trusted and open team where continuous improvement and mentorship is part of our DNA. In addition you will improve your technique and spread the knowledge on best practices of software development. By using agile and lean management you can stay focused on the software development.
Finally this is the opportunity to learn and to increase your skills, competence and experience. In an international facility such as MAX IV you will meet open minded people from different perspectives.  Inside the KITS group, composed of network, system, hardware engineers and scientific software experts, we promote a devops style cross functional team. With learning in mind you have the possibility to attend high profile software conferences like europycon, pysci, linuxconf…

Project

At MAX IV we are facing different type of experimental detectors which can generate high throughput of data or analysers system with complex synchronisation. Our current solution is mainly based on filesystem to move data to the analysis pipeline softwares. This is a convenient solution but not very efficient to streamline the analysis and get the result as soon as possible.

The scope of the acquisition project will covers the integration of new detectors and analysers via socket (plain, zmq, http, …). It will include as well as to build a efficient streaming system of the data efficiently to different services like the data processing and storage to HDF5. The system will provide a live visualisation of the experimental data with possibility of parallel of preprocessing. 
The acquisition system will be the central nerve system of the data, interfacing upstream  the control system and many services downstream like HPC cluster, GPFS storage system, a meta data catalogue or for online visualisation.
 
The ultimate goal for the acquisition system is to integrate a data quality assessment to help the research in their decision. And part of the project would be to define the interoperability for the different services producing or consuming streaming for an European collaboration.

 
This position is open for either a junior or a senior developer. As a junior you will learn very innovative technology under the mentorship of our senior developers and help greatly to the success of this project. As a senior you are ready to develop the project thanks to your extensive experience in collaboration with the scientists and our developers team.

Requirements
In order to apply for this position you are required to have:

A university degree
Proven skills with Python and C++ programming.
Software development in a Linux operating system environment.
An open source spirit and knowing what Agile means
A good communication skill

As a junior you are motivated to learn new technologies.
 
As a senior you have a relevant experience of an acquisition system.

Desirable

Working in such an environment it is preferable to have a minimum knowledge of:
Software programming paradigms: functional, object, reactive …
Other Software programming languages: C, C++11, LUA, JS, GO…
Software engineering: test, continuous integration and deployment …
Hardware and Electronics: DAC, ADC and other GPIO, motion, robotic…
Network and System infrastructure: TCP/IP layers, OS configuration…
Web development: Microframework, HTTP…

In addition to the above it is regarded as highly important to supply evidence that you are a team player and can demonstrate your communication and collaborative skills. We expect you to have the capability to coordinate projects.

Lund University welcomes applicants with diverse backgrounds and experiences. We regard gender equality and diversity as a strength and an asset.
We kindly decline all sales and marketing contacts.