Data Access Engineer

Data Access Engineer – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Location: North Carolina, US
Employment type: Permanent Staff (EHRA Non-Faculty)
Position type: Full-Time Permanent
Job Title: Data Access Engineer
FTE: 1
Hours per week: 40

The Argus Array will be the largest optical telescope array ever assembled. As a Data Access Engineer, you will develop software systems to bring Argus data products to astronomers worldwide, scaling from prototype to full-array through cloud services, distributed storage, and GPU-accelerated pipelines.

• Design, implement, and maintain high-throughput, distributed message systems and data pipelines.
• Integrate with cloud services and existing distributed storage networks to support large-scale data access.
• Take the alert distribution system to production, delivering real-time notifications and images to professional and amateur astronomers.
• Oversee periodic releases of trillion-point light curves, ensuring data versioning, integrity, and accessibility.
• Collaborate within a small, flat-management team, contributing to hardware and software subsystems.
• Develop intuitive, API-first user interfaces for internal QA and public data access.

• Relevant post-baccalaureate degree required (or foreign equivalent).
• For candidates with comparable independent research productivity, a relevant bachelor’s degree (or foreign equivalent) and 3+ years of relevant experience may be acceptable.
• May require terminal degree and licensure.

• Python expertise of 5+ years.
• Experience designing and optimizing high-throughput, distributed message systems of 3+ years.
• Proficiency across the software development lifecycle (version control, documentation, testing).

• Experience with cloud-based relational databases (Postgre
  
  SQL, Apache Kafka or equivalents).
• Knowledge of time-series databases optimized for astronomical data storage and retrieval.
• Previous experience translating scientific requirements into technical specifications.
• Experience building researcher-friendly interfaces for complex data sets.

Ability to sustain nighttime validations testing and monitoring as part of a rotating support personnel schedule.

Not Applicable.