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Rubin Observatory | https://rubinobservatory.org | Senior DevOps Eng | Tucson AZ OR possible remote from US states

And now for something completely different.. (drumroll)... astronomy!

We're building a big telescope to carry out the biggest, faster, widest survey in optical astronomy. I run a small devops team in a much larger data management division - we do current data services work - lots of Python (3) data services (FastAPI) running on Kubernetes on Google Cloud and on-prem (ie sometimes in... actually clouds).

I have a number of refugees from well-known dotcoms in my team, here's why they tell me they work here despite, you know, the universe not handing out stock options:

* Sustained and humane software development, with opportunities to refactor code for incremental improvements and extend your codebase over multiple years

* No pager. If you want to turn off your phone after hours, fine (I keep mine on because fixing telescopes is actually fun to me but there's no on-call)

* No doing interviews as your job.

* 100% open source with many opportunities to upstream (all our code is on Github: https://github.com/lsst-sqre )

* Surprisingly (for academia) current toolchain and coding practices

* Benefits, stability w/ opportunity for growth. My full-stack engineer joined 8 years ago and is (still) doing better work every year. My most recent hire is a security engineer who has been with me longer than the average dotcom tenure and seems to think it's Christmas every time I tell him he's allowed to tidy up code we already have in production.

* Pay is decent, more so if you're not paying Bay Area rent. Not as much as you'd make as a Senior Engineer at Google. But:

* Nobody is the product. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

If you're interested: https://ls.st/square-job . And if you are a US taxpayer, thank you for funding our scientific mission!




If you're ever looking for a data scientist, one of my good friends has a PhD in astrophysics and left academia to do SQL, Python ML, and dashboarding. She's super sharp and I think she'd jump all over an opportunity like this.


Hah I ran into the comment size limit and took out

- women work here - in technical and scientific roles

You are welcome to tell your friend to reach out, I am always happy to talk to fellow women in the field so I can learn what they are looking for and let them know when the right fit appears.


Actually, in case it's of interest to her, over at the American Institute of Physics in the DC metro area, I'm looking for a solutions architect to help support the institute and the 10 member societies connected to it. The role is to help define infrastructure standards regarding our digital experience platform (Blueconic, MailChimp, Tableau, Brightspot) as we migrate away from Drupal.

Challenging project that can help influence engagement with students, the public, and the physical sciences community for decades to come.

https://americaninstituteofphysics.applicantstack.com/x/deta...


Just applied! Space has fascinated me since I was very young. Indeed, the first nightmare I had was of falling into a black hole!


Need any FORTH programmers? ;)

http://www.forth.org/KittPeakForthPrimer.pdf


This is why I mention things like "surprisingly current toolchain for academia" :-) My personal philosophy is staying current costs far less in the end that falling behind and then needing a giant transition...


Then you'll love Mitch Bradley's CForth and OpenFirmware Forth, which he is always keeping current and up to date, including arm64 support! ;)

https://github.com/MitchBradley/cforth

https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware

https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware/tree/master/cpu...


As someone around the telescope a few years back, I would absolutely recommend applying! Frossie is legit and is an excellent engineer and boss


Hey! Just in case you are looking for a immediate joine for any data engineering, please take a look at : https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmistri/


This is a really neat role, always love seeing opportunities in science and academia open up like this.

The job req mentions representing the work Aura is doing; do you folks have talks recorded or published anywhere?


Oh thanks for asking, I should add nobody is _required_ to get out there and be a performing monkey or anything, but it's nice to get out there and talk about our work once in a while, especially since we're taxpayer funded and also because it's nice to remind ourselves occasionally there's more to this job that git push :-) One of my devs hates giving talks and so he doesn't and that's fine.

Here's a talk we gave at Influx Days on how my team uses InfluxDB that also gives background to the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Osy0dvFM674

The mission of the telescope is to carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and so if you search for Rubin LSST you'll get even better stuff I'm sure.

PS not a talk but here's my favorite video we have ever put out, it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GicDYZXMboc "We'll be counting stars" as the song goes...


Hi frossie,

Any Visa/Nationality requirements?


Thanks for asking, sorry for the delay I was checking with the bureaucracy what the answer is (as we are technically government subcontractors we don't make the rules).

My understanding is we do sponsor H1s. The vast majority of nationalities are fine, however we do have on-premises computing on a Department of Energy facility, and they bar citizens of the following countries from being granted an account on their systems: https://www.state.gov/state-sponsors-of-terrorism/ so a candidate with those nationalities would be at a disadvantage.

Unfortunately for reasons outside our control, remote work is only possible from residents of the following US states:

Arizona

California

Colorado

Florida

Hawaii

Maryland

New Mexico

Texas

Virginia

Washington

Washington DC


Thanks for the reply, frossie. I do understand fair share of government bureaucracy as I'm currently employed as one. :-)

I think, I'll throw my hat in the ring.




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