IT solution engineer for personalized health research

To support teaching and research, IT Services (ITS) of ETH Zurich are working as a service organization in a large and complex IT environment. Scientific IT Services (SIS, a section of ITS) aims at bridging the gap between computational research and IT service and infrastructure provisioning and provide a stimulating, flexible and family-friendly working environment.

SIS are working closely together with ETH researchers to provide support in the wide area of scientific computing from data management and analysis, development of scientific software to the operation of high performance and cloud computing infrastructures. For sensitive research data, SIS offers secure data and IT services with the Leonhard Med platform. At the national level, SIS with the Leonhard Med platform is part of the BioMedIT network, representing the BioMedIT node Zurich.

SIS are currently seeking to appoint a IT solution engineer for Personalized Health Research to support research projects on Leonhard Med and BioMedIT.

The goal of this position is to support the research projects in using the Leonhard Med platform to securely transfer, access, store, manage, analyze and share sensitive research data.

Your responsibilities are distributed over the full lifecycle of the projects:

• Actively collaborate with scientists to understand and assess the IT requirements of their research projects.
• Engineer, implement and support new end-to-end technical solutions, based on the Leonhard Med platform, to support research projects in their data transfer, management and computational analysis needs
• Integrate existing project's specific research IT solutions into the Leonhard Med platform, while maintaining the required level of security and data protection
• Actively collaborate with the Leonhard Med operation and engineering team to further develop the platform (level of automation, security controls, portfolio of services) and to continuously improve the user experience
• Provide service and user support at Leonhard Med
• Be the Account Manager for relevant projects at Leonhard Med and BioMedIT

In this role, you will interact closely with the researchers (seeking optimal solutions, providing consulting and user support) and with the Leonhard Med and BioMedIT platform teams (transforming IT requirements into actionable technical tasks, proactively contributing to task development, cooperating in technical troubleshooting,).

This position requires 2-3 years of relevant work experience and a qualification in a related field, such as bio or medical informatics, information technology, computer science or a closely related discipline and a good understanding of biomedical data, relevant technologies and available IT solutions.

This position requires: 

• Experience in Linux-based system and comfortable with the command line interface (as user and/or as system administrator) 
• Experience in using scripting languages (e.g. Bash or Python)
• Experience in scripting around REST-API interfaces for service integration
• Experience in using software engineering and computational reproducibility tools (e.g., Git, Conda, Docker, Singularity, venv, pip)
• Good communication skills and the ability to collaborate with other IT specialists are necessary
• Aptitude for finding good solutions to complex IT problems, together with a "focus on the finished product" mindset.
• Customer and user support skills, with a genuine interest towards customer relationship management and user support, together with a proactive "can-do" attitude
• English is required, German is an asset
• Knowledge of virtualization technologies (cloud, kubernetes, docker) are an asset

At the Department IT Services, we are committed to promoting flexible and family-friendly working models, and a healthy work-life balance is important to us. ETH Zurich supports a policy for diversity and inclusion and we especially encourage qualified female candidates to apply. Further more we offer:

• A highly interdisciplinary work environment with interesting and challenging tasks. 
• Work within an agile team of experienced and highly motivated IT specialists. 
• Opportunity to work and gain experience with cutting-edge computing technologies. 
• Opportunity to engage in pioneering medical research IT projects and to closely collaborate with medical researchers. 

The position is located in Zurich with occasional travel to Basel and other Swiss cities. The contract will be for a period of one (1) year.