Sr. Engineer, Scientific DataOps

AbbVie - Cambridge, MA

Full-time

Cambridge, MA

Chemical Manufacturing

About the position

The Scientific IT group at AbbVie Bioresearch Center is dedicated to supporting a variety of technical computing workloads that serve a community of scientists focused on pharmaceutical research and development. This position offers a unique opportunity to work within a cross-functional team of informatics scientists and IT professionals, contributing to the development of a next-generation scientific compute platform. The ideal candidate will have significant DataOps experience and will play a crucial role in expanding our data management strategies. In this role, you will be responsible for developing technical computing strategies and implementing them, which includes hardware, operating system, automation, and application software deployments. You will design and maintain data flows necessary for backup, archival, and compute, while securely integrating data from multiple internal and external sources into cohesive data flows. Writing and maintaining scripts and databases to move and track data will be a key part of your responsibilities. You will collaborate with external scientific software vendors to design scripts for extracting data from proprietary systems such as RDMS, NoSQL, XML, JSON, and CSV into corporate databases or BI tools. Additionally, you will implement scalable and relocatable deployment strategies through automation, orchestration, scripting, and containerization in both on-premises and cloud settings, applying DevOps methodologies to scientific computing. Working closely with developers and data scientists, you will migrate existing custom-built applications into Docker containers and increase the adoption of CI/CD infrastructure. As a member of the research teams, you will engage directly with researchers and scientists in designing, prototyping, testing, tuning for parallelization, and preparing documentation for processing and data acquisition pipelines. You will also respond to user requests for application troubleshooting, transfer knowledge, and promote new technologies within the user community through one-on-one help sessions and documentation. Your role will include assisting users in installing, configuring, and scripting informatics tools and applications, guiding their analytical processes by understanding their work and data flows. General Linux/UNIX administration will also be part of your responsibilities.

Responsibilities

• Develop technical computing strategies and implement them, including hardware, operating system, automation, and application software deployments.
• Design and maintain data flows required for backup, archival, and compute.
• Securely integrate data from multiple internal and external sources into cohesive data flows.
• Write and maintain scripts and databases required to move and track data.
• Collaborate with external scientific software vendors to design scripts for extracting data from proprietary systems into corporate databases or BI tools.
• Implement scalable and relocatable deployment strategies through automation, orchestration, scripting, and containerization in both on-premises and cloud settings.
• Work with developers and data scientists to migrate existing custom-built applications into Docker containers.
• Increase adoption of CI/CD infrastructure in collaboration with developers and data scientists.
• Engage directly with researchers and scientists in designing, prototyping, testing, tuning for parallelization, and preparing documentation for processing and data acquisition pipelines.
• Respond to user requests for application troubleshooting.
• Transfer knowledge and promote new technologies within the user community through help sessions and documentation.
• Assist users in installing, configuring, and scripting informatics tools and applications.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree with 6 years' experience; Master's Degree with 5 years' experience; PhD with 0 years' experience in Computer Science, IT, Bioinformatics or related field.
• 1-3+ years of experience in the planning, deployment and management of Linux systems (RHEL, Ubuntu).
• 1-3+ years of strong scripting or programming experience (Bash, Python, Perl, Ruby, C/C++).
• 1-3+ years of strong database and SQL experience (Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL).
• 1-3+ years of experience with containerization tools (Docker, Docker Build, Kubernetes).
• 1-3+ years of experience in the implementation, integrating and use of orchestration and automation tools or platforms (Ansible/Salt, Jenkins, Kubernetes).
• 1-3+ years Amazon Web Services experience.
• Ability to work independently and demonstrate excellent project management and communication skills with a strong commitment to customer service.
• Good presentation, training and documentation skills.
• Comfortable working in a dynamic environment and developing flexible solutions to meet evolving requirements.
• Ability to multitask and prioritize work requirements with minimal supervision.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills: demonstrated ability to communicate effectively with scientists, developers, application analysts, managers and IT.
• Strong problem solving and negotiation skills.
• Requires minimal direction from leadership and possesses the ability to learn quickly.
• Ability to successfully negotiate and collaborate with others of different skill sets, backgrounds and levels within and external to the organization.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience working in the Life Sciences field or Pharmaceutical Industry.
• Demonstrated experience/knowledge of computational clusters (CPU & GPU), HPC and/or grid computing environments.
• 1-3+ years of experience supporting/developing informatics systems in machine learning, medical or basic science research environments.
• 1-3+ years virtualization / VMware experience.
• 1-3+ years Windows Server administration.