Technician for Database on Demand Operations Support (IT-DA-DB-2024-105-GRAE)

Your responsibilities

Join CERN's Database and Analytics group to operate and support the Database on Demand (DBOD) service, used by many IT services, and across CERN's experimental programme. The DBOD service provides more than one thousand MySQL, PostgreSQL, and InfluxDB instances, through multiple lifecycle environments, offering to its users administrative functionality and features such as configuration management, monitoring, backup and recovery, replication, and high availability.

As an early-career technician working in the Database Services (DB) team, you will contribute to the administration of the instances hosted in the DBOD service. You will participate in the evolution of the user interface (based on Angular and Flask), in the service configuration and architecture design, database upgrades and patches campaigns, hardware migrations, monitoring of systems health and performance to ensure high levels of performance, availability and security. You will also assist and advise users and play a role in the evolution of the DBOD service, discussing and working with the team on service enhancements including technical mentorship and cross-training to peers.

As a DevOps team member, your role will include both operations tasks and software development in Python, bash, and Angular. You will be working with open-source software and gaining experience with the IT infrastructure stack used at CERN, such as AlmaLinux 9, OpenStack, Puppet, Prometheus, GitLab, etc.

Your profile

Skills and/or knowledge

Required Skills:

• Experience working with MySQL, PostgreSQL, or InfluxDB databases;
• Experience with SQL, Unix shell script and Python;
• Knowledge of Linux operating system;
• Knowledge of service administration and configuration tools like Puppet;
• Experience in the monitoring of system health and performance indicators.

Skills/knowledge that would be an advantage:

• Familiarity with large-scale and high-availability database environments;
• Experience with Angular and Flask;
• Experience with containerisation/container orchestration;
• Knowledge of the ELK stack.

Language Skills:

• Fluent in English, the ability to work in French would be an advantage.

Eligibility criteria:

• You are a national of a CERN Member or Associate Member State.
• By the application deadline, you have a maximum of two years of professional experience since graduation in Computer Science (or a related field) and your highest educational qualification is a general secondary education diploma.
• You have never had a CERN fellow or graduate contract before.
• Applicants with a Bachelors, Masters or PhD degree are not eligible.

Job closing date: 15 August at 23:59 PM CEST.

Job reference: IT-DA-DB-2024-105-GRAE

Contract duration: 24 months, with a possible extension up to 36 months maximum.

Target start date: 01-October-2024

This position requires:

• Residence in the immediate vicinity of the Organization's installations.

What we offer

• A monthly stipend of 4569 Swiss Francs (net of tax).
• Coverage by CERN's comprehensive health scheme (for yourself, your spouse and children), and membership of the CERN Pension Fund.
• Depending on your individual circumstances: installation grant; family, child and infant allowances; payment of travel expenses at the beginning and end of contract.
• 30 days of paid leave per year.
• On-the-job and formal training at CERN as well as in-house language courses for English and/or French.

About us

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. Using the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments, they study the basic constituents of matter - fundamental particles that are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives physicists clues about how particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. Find out more on http://home.cern.

Diversity has been an integral part of CERN's mission since its foundation and is an established value of the Organization. Employing a diverse workforce is central to our success.