Scientific Platform Engineer

Harvard University • Boston, MA

1d • Remote

About The Position

The SBGrid Consortium at Harvard Medical School supports a large international research community by curating and distributing a scientific software platform used across structural biology, cryo-EM, and related fields. The platform includes approximately 650 software titles and 6,000 versions across macOS and Linux and is deployed across laptops, workstations, HPC clusters, and cloud environments. We are hiring a Scientific Platform Engineer to help lead the modernization, security, reliability, and engineering evolution of this platform. This is a platform engineering role with substantial independent responsibility for CI pipelines, reproducible packaging, deterministic installation, release engineering, runtime hardening, observability, and software supply-chain integrity. The role is designed to be primarily engineering and platform-development work, not routine support, and it directly impacts software delivery and platform reliability across a globally distributed scientific infrastructure.

Requirements

• Minimum of five years’ post-secondary education or relevant work experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field.
• Minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in platform engineering, systems engineering, DevOps, build/release engineering, research computing infrastructure, or a closely related area.
• Two or more years of professional software development experience.
• Experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, similar).
• Experience with an Infrastructure-as-Code tool (e.g. Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Terraform, etc).
• Comfortable with Linux internals and scripting in Bash.
• Experience debugging cross-platform build or runtime issues.
• Solid programming skills in at least one interpreted language (Python preferred, Javascript, Ruby, etc).
• Comfort working in a remote, documentation-driven environment.
• Experience with HPC environments or research computing.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Singularity/Apptainer, similar).
• Experience with artifact signing or supply-chain tooling.
• Experience working in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments.
• Interest in scientific research software ecosystems.
• Strong engineering discipline and curiosity matter.

Nice To Haves

• Research/HPC exposure (Slurm, shared filesystems, scientific software stacks)
• AWS familiarity (useful, not required)
• Apptainer/Singularity in scientific/HPC contexts

Responsibilities

• Design and implement CI pipelines for scientific software across macOS and Linux.
• Develop regression and smoke test harnesses for packaged software.
• Catch failures before distribution rather than after client installation.
• Support fast-moving development branches (e.g., nightly builds) safely.
• Help define and enforce a canonical build contract.
• Improve dependency tracking and version control.
• Enable deterministic rebuilds across environments.
• Contribute to artifact integrity and metadata tracking (e.g., SBOM readiness).
• Add tests and versioning discipline to SBGrid’s runtime wrapper system (“capsules”).
• Introduce feature flags and safer rollout mechanisms.
• Improve logging, observability, and error classification.
• Develop dashboards and structured signals around build failures and common error states.
• Reduce reliance on tribal knowledge by encoding workflows into systems.

Benefits

• Generous paid time off including parental leave
• Medical, dental, and vision health insurance coverage starting on day one
• Retirement plans with university contributions
• Wellbeing and mental health resources
• Support for families and caregivers
• Professional development opportunities including tuition assistance and reimbursement
• Commuter benefits, discounts and campus perks

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Associate degree