Our team and mission

ESA maintains a world-leading Science Programme with missions in heliophysics, planetary science, astrophysics and fundamental physics. Its mission is to ‘Empower Europe to lead space science’. The Department for Science Operations and Office for Science Engagement and Oversight host together the scientists and engineers that oversee the space missions, from study to end of operations. It defines and develops the science operation systems for the missions and operates the missions in space, as well as archiving and curating their data during operations and beyond. Our main objective is to maximise the scientific output of ESA’s space science missions for the benefit of humankind.

You will join the Data Science Section to support the development of the ESA Datalabs science platform. The section is a cross-disciplinary team working with various science missions including Euclid, Gaia, XMM-Newton and JWST and science operations teams. Aside from experts in astronomy, computer science and systems engineering, the section frequently works with many young professionals as well as universities, researchers and students. Through its diverse setup, the section tackles many tasks ranging from technical infrastructure topics over scientific activities to (international) community building efforts around data science and machine learning.

You are encouraged to visit the ESA website: http://www.esa.int

Field(s) of activity/research for the traineeship

The goal of the traineeship is to support the development of a hybrid-cloud platform to enable the return on science from ESA space science missions like Euclid, XMM, Integral or JWST. Hence this is an exciting opportunity to learn and apply a wide range of technical skills in a complex organisational setup and to contribute to help scientists improve our understanding of the universe by making science data accessible to researchers worldwide.

Your tasks will include:

• supporting solution architecture definition and evolution for ESA Datalabs and related platforms;
• define and carry out tasks, tests and validation as part of the development team;
• carry out rapid prototyping to guide the way for future evolution and functional extension (related to e.g. machine-learning, batch and parallel processing, GPU processing);
• support large-scale data infrastructure challenges up to petabyte scale;
• support improvements to user experience via monitoring and logging and liaise with community of stakeholders from space science missions;
• support integration with space science open-source community.

Technical competencies

Behavioural competencies

Result Orientation

Operational Efficiency

Fostering Cooperation

Relationship Management

Continuous Improvement

Forward Thinking

For more information, please refer to ESA Core Behavioural Competencies guidebook

Education

You should have just completed or be in the final year of your master’ s degree in computer science or similar.

Additional requirements

The working languages of the Agency are English and French. A good knowledge of one of these is required. Knowledge of another Member State language would be an asset.

You should have good interpersonal and communication skills and should be able to work in a multicultural environment, both independently and as part of a team. Previous experience of working in international teams can be considered an asset. Your motivation, overall professional perspective and career goals will also be explored during the later stages of the selection process.

You should also be familiar with software development and software engineering best practices (ideally in cloud and on-premise environments) along with a strong interest in learning about Kubernetes.

Additionally, experience with the following is a plus:

• DevOps engineering;
• open-source software development;
• HPC and batch-processing frameworks;
• tools and languages such as Python, JavaScript, Jupyter, and Docker;
• network infrastructure and security.