Remote Scientific Platform Engineer: CI, Packaging & Reliability

Harvard University; Massachusetts; On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous paid time off

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Tuition assistance and reimbursement

Commuter benefits and campus perks

Job summary

Harvard University’s SBGrid Consortium at Harvard Medical School is hiring a Scientific Platform Engineer to lead modernization, security, reliability, and engineering evolution of a scientific software platform used across structural biology, cryo-EM, and related fields.

The role focuses on CI pipelines, reproducible packaging, deterministic installation, release engineering, runtime hardening, observability, and software-supply chain integrity, with >90% project work and minimal break-fix

Qualifications

• Minimum of five years’ post-secondary education or relevant work experience.
• 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.

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.

Job description

Harvard University’s SBGrid Consortium at Harvard Medical School is hiring a Scientific Platform Engineer to lead modernization, security, reliability, and engineering evolution of a scientific software platform used across structural biology, cryo-EM, and related fields.

The role focuses on CI pipelines, reproducible packaging, deterministic installation, release engineering, runtime hardening, observability, and software-supply chain integrity, with >90% project work and minimal break-fix