Monday, July 29, 2013

NEON - Software Engineer

Overview
 The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a $430 million dollar observatory project dedicated to understanding how changes in climate, land use and invasive species impact ecology. For the next three decades NEON will collect a comprehensive range of ecological data on a continental scale across 20 eco-climatic domains representing US ecosystems. NEON will use cutting edge technology including an airborne observation platform that will capture images of regional landscapes and vegetation; mobile, re-locatable, and fixed data collection sites with automated ground sensors to monitor soil and atmosphere; and trained field crews who will observe and sample populations of diverse organisms and collect soil and water data. A leading edge cyber-infrastructure will calibrate, store and publish this information. The Observatory will grow to 300+ personnel and will be the first of its kind designed to detect and enable forecasting of ecological change at continental scales.

Summary:
 Reporting to the Director of Computing, Software Engineer-Web Applications will design, develop and maintain web-based solutions that will allow scientists, educators, and the public to access to NEON scientific data and NEON generated content. Working with educators, communicators, designers, and software engineers, the web developer will contribute technical expertise to ensure that NEON web sites run smoothly and that NEON scientific data is accessible online. In addition, the web developer will provide back-end coding to realize designs developed by other team members.

Term:
 This is a three year term position.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
 • Work directly with the Cyber infrastructure team to formulate a design capable of meeting the data publishing requirements for all NEON instrumentation platform data.
 • Responsible for the technical aspects of web site development, testing and deployment to support the creation of a web portal for NEON scientific data and educational products.
 • Coordinate, communicate and collaborate with CI team.
 • Implement design revisions to the existing NEON web sites based on team decisions and direction provided by project.
 • Develop web based tools for scientific data visualization and annotation.
 • Implement tools such as GOOGLE analytics for monitoring site traffic and compilation of visitor statistics.
 • Create REST Web Services for data placement, cataloguing, and retrieval from a variety of databases and file systems.
 • Create designs to support the development of high-quality, robust, production level code and technology while minimizing development and production support costs.
 • Select and test COTS and open source solutions, and develop prototype solutions to validate proposed designs.
 • Follow NEON information security confidentiality policy and procedures.

Required Education, Experience, Knowledge, Skills:
 • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or related field.
 • Seven (7) or more years' experience working with software development teams.
 • 3-5 years of experience with HTML coding and javascript and using CSS in website development.
 • 3-5 years of Java programming experience.
 • 3-5 years experience developing and implementing Web Portals using Liferay or jBoss.
 • Expertise integrating web content with social networking technologies (such as wikis, blogs, Facebook, twitter, Flickr) and expertise with web APIs (jQuery, Dojo, Google, Yahoo, Flickr, etc.).

Preferred Education, Experience, Knowledge, Skills:
 • Master's Degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering.
 • Experience with SQL in large scale databases such as ORACLE.
 • Experience in successful scientific application development with particular emphasis in designing and developing data publishing solutions.
 • Experience with structuring, developing and implementing interactive websites using Drupal or another Content Management System.
 • LAMP expertise (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).

Apply at www.NEONINC.org

NEON Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Women, Minorities, Veterans and Disabled Persons are encouraged to apply.