[Position-available] Wanted: Junior Software QA Engineer for a Research Computing Environment

[Ben Eisenbraun]

We have an open position for a junior Software QA Engineer in the Sliz
Research Group at Harvard Medical School <http://hkl.hms.harvard.edu/>.
The position is in support of an integrated suite of scientific software
used in structural biology and related disciplines and available to labs
worldwide through the SBGrid Consortium <http://sbgrid.org/>.

Structural biology is heavily dependent on its software tools, and we
maintain a largish (~200 titles) suite of applications running on linux and
OS X.  The primary responsibilities of the position will be maintaining and
extending the software suite through configuring, building and testing the
scientific software packages.

This sort of scientific software is mostly written by academics to
scratch their own itch, and it often comes as source code with little
documentation on how to build and configure it to do something useful.
The software is written in a polyglot of languages (Fortran, C, C++,
Python, Java, Perl, Tcl/Tk and many sh/csh scripts) and built with any one
of a number of different build systems (autotools, cmake, scons, homebrew
shell scripts/makefiles, setuptools, etc).

Building software packages in this environment ranges from trivial to
virtually impossible, and similarly runs the gamut from incredibly
frustrating to supremely rewarding.  We currently support about 1100
software users, and some of them are doing really cool science.

The job is at HMS, which is in the Longwood Medical Area part of Boston.  
Public transit is the Green Line and many buses.  I have found the work
environment to be really good.  If you prove that you're competent and
reliable, then there is a lot of scheduling flexibility, options to work
from home, and there is a high degree of autonomy in our little group.
It's also a Harvard job with all the attendant perks.

Desired skills:
- knowledge of a programming language (Good)
- knowledge of an interpreted language _and_ a compiled language (Better)
- sh or csh shell scripting experience (Good)
- both sh and csh (Better)
- basic knowledge of how to drive a compiler (Good)
- experience with high performance compilers (Intel/Portland/Absoft/etc)
  (Better)

Required skill:
- autodidacticism

That's it!  If you're the right person, we'll give you lots of time to do
on-the-job learning.

Email me for more details.  Thanks.

-ben

--
einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature,
because god is not capricious or arbitrary. no such faith comforts the
software engineer.                               <frederick p. brooks>