Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Harvard Medical School supports biomedical discovery, education, and innovation through a diverse community dedicated to improving human health. The Scientific Platform Engineer will modernize, secure, and improve the reliability of the SBGrid scientific software platform by developing CI pipelines, reproducible packaging, release engineering, runtime hardening, observability, and software supply-chain safeguards.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement CI pipelines for scientific software across macOS and Linux
- Develop regression and smoke test harnesses for packaged software
- Catch failures before distribution rather than after client installation
- Support fast-moving development branches (e.g., nightly builds) safely
- Help define and enforce a canonical build contract
- Improve dependency tracking and version control
- Enable deterministic rebuilds across environments
- Contribute to artifact integrity and metadata tracking (e.g., SBOM readiness)
- Add tests and versioning discipline to SBGrid’s runtime wrapper system (“capsules”)
- Introduce feature flags and safer rollout mechanisms
- Improve logging, observability, and error classification
- Develop dashboards and structured signals around build failures and common error states
- Reduce reliance on tribal knowledge by encoding workflows into systems
Skills
- Minimum of five years' post-secondary education or relevant work experience
- Standard Hours/Schedule: 35 hours per week. Remote candidates must be available to work during Eastern Standard Time (EST) business hours
- Employees in fully remote positions must work all scheduled hours in a Harvard registered state in compliance with the University's Policy on Employment Outside of Massachusetts
- Individuals must meet work location sponsorship requirements prior to employment
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field
- Minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in platform engineering, systems engineering, DevOps, build/release engineering, research computing infrastructure, or a closely related area
- Two or more years of professional software development experience
- Experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, similar)
- Experience with an Infrastructure-as-Code tool (e.g. Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Terraform, etc)
- Comfortable with Linux internals and scripting in Bash
- Experience debugging cross-platform build or runtime issues
- Solid programming skills in at least one interpreted language (Python preferred, Javascript, Ruby, etc)
- Comfort working in a remote, documentation-driven environment
- Experience with HPC environments or research computing
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Singularity/Apptainer, similar)
- Experience with artifact signing or supply-chain tooling
- Experience working in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments
- Interest in scientific research software ecosystems
- Strong engineering discipline and curiosity matter
Benefits
- Generous paid time off including parental leave
- Medical, dental, and vision health insurance coverage starting on day one
- Retirement plans with university contributions
- Wellbeing and mental health resources
- Support for families and caregivers
- Professional development opportunities including tuition assistance and reimbursement
- Commuter benefits, discounts and campus perks
- Fully remote work arrangement
Company Overview