Beschreibung
Tasks:
The Exposure Time Calculators are a suite of web applications used by astronomers as tools for our customers observation proposal preparations. The total usage of the system peaks to about runs during the Call for Proposals periods in March and September each year.
The work involves maintenance and development of ETC applications for the VLT and VLT Interferometer (VLTI) within an existing CGI Client Server web application framework, in which the Back End model and numerical calculation engine is implemented in C++ and the Front End mostly based on static HTML templates and some JavaScript.
The work will also include refurbishment and enhancements in particular in the C++ Back End framework, towards establishing a dynamic interface to a new, interactive single-page web application Front End.
The work will eventually include efforts in conversion and migration of the existing ETC applications to the new refurbished framework.
While the position can be filled by one Full time consultant, it can be considered to divide the work between two consultants working part time in their fields of expertise: On one hand we have the ETC application maintenance and development tasks in the present framework; on the other hand more independent C++ Back End framework development work, with less need for domain specific knowledge.
necessary knowledge:
must have:
University degree in Computer Science, Physics, Electrical Engineering or equivalent.
The ideal consultant is a software engineer with experience and sufficient expertise in developing numerical scientific applications in C++ and handling of scientific data. The consultant should be used to work in a Unix/Linux environment. Experience with web technologies, at least basic HTML and JavaScript is required. He or she will be able to support any maintenance and development efforts, contributing to the entire software life cycle, from analysis and design, coding, documentation and testing, to deployment and maintenance. He or she shall have experience and sufficient expertise with software engineering practices and development tools, including version control, development environments and debuggers. He or she has excellent command of the English language, very good oral and written communication skills, flexibility and customer orientation.
nice-to-have:
Knowledge about observational astronomy, interferometry and astronomical instrumentation will be a strong advantage.
Working experience with web technologies, in particular HTML, CSS, JavaScript and related toolkits will be an advantage.
Experience with work on an existing software codebase in an international environment will be an advantage.
Some knowledge of Scripting languages and Python is desirable.
Experience in code validation, unit/regression testing would be an important asset.