This is the position of Information Technology Specialist (Search and Back-office development) in the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) Project, High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The ADS serves a corpus of more than 16M scientific articles with more than 149M citations to a worldwide community of astronomers, researchers and librarians with hundreds of thousands of requests per day.  

Duties

The ADS system uses a modern development stack: a custom build of the open-source search engine Apache Solr, a highly responsive UI engineered on top of React, a high performance distributed brokerage system, and cloud-based hosted services with Kubernetes in Amazon Web Services. The primary responsibility of the employee is to maintain and enhance the capabilities of the ADS search engine, maintain its public API, enhance its text processing pipelines, and develop new functionality and services to support metadata enhancement, citation analysis, and recommendations while relying on ADS natural language processing / machine learning / deep learning plans.

Requirements

• Pre and Post background Investigation.
• May be required to serve a one year probationary period.
• Direct deposit/electronic funds transfer required for salary payment.
• Selection may be made at either the grade 11, 12 or 13
• This is a career ladder opportunity with promotion potential to grade 13

Qualifications

For all positions individuals must have IT-related experience demonstrating each of the four competencies listed below.1. Attention to Detail - Is thorough when performing work and conscientious about attending to detail.2. Customer Service - Works with clients and customers (that is, any individuals who use or receive the services or products that your work unit produces, including the general public, individuals who work in the agency, other agencies, or organizations outside the Government) to assess their needs, provide information or assistance, resolve their problems, or satisfy their expectations; knows about available products and services; is committed to providing quality products and services.3. Oral Communication - Expresses information (for example, ideas or facts) to individuals or groups effectively, taking into account the audience and nature of the information (for example, technical, sensitive, controversial); makes clear and convincing oral presentations; listens to others, attends to nonverbal cues, and responds appropriately.4. Problem Solving - Identifies problems; determines accuracy and relevance of information; uses sound judgment to generate and evaluate alternatives, and to make recommendations. AND    Candidates for grade 11 must possess minimum of one year of specialized  experience equivalent to at least the grade 9 in the normal line of progression for this occupation. Specialized experience is experience that has equipped the applicant with the particular competencies/knowledge, skills, and abilities to successfully perform the duties of the position such as knowledge of the Linux operating system and Docker; knowledge of the Java programming language; knowledge of the Python programming language; knowledge of search engines such as Solr and Elasticsearch; knowledge of SQL databases such as PostgreSQL; working knowledge of web standards and technologies such as HTTP, REST, and JSON; ability to build secure, reusable and scalable code and libraries to support applications, services and databases.  Candidates for grade 12 must possess a minimum of one year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the grade 11 in the normal line of progression for this occupation. Specialized experience is experience that has equipped the applicant with the particular competencies/knowledge, skills, and abilities to successfully perform the duties of the position such as knowledge of the Linux operating system and Docker; knowledge of the Java programming language at a proficient level; knowledge of the Python programming language at a proficient level; knowledge of search engines such as Solr and Elasticsearch; knowledge of SQL databases such as PostgreSQL; working knowledge of web standards and technologies such as HTTP, REST, and JSON; ability to build secure, reusable and scalable code and libraries to support applications, services and databases. Candidates for grade 13 must possess a minimum of one year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the grade 12 in the normal line of progression for this occupation. Specialized experience is experience that has equipped the applicant with the particular competencies/knowledge, skills, and abilities to successfully perform the duties of the position such as knowledge of the Linux operating system and Docker at a proficient level; knowledge of the Java programming language at a proficient level; knowledge of the Python programming language at a proficient level; knowledge of search engines such as Solr and Elasticsearch at a proficient level; knowledge of SQL databases such as PostgreSQL; knowledge of asynchronous messaging brokers such as RabbitMQ or Kafka; working knowledge of web standards and technologies such as HTTP, REST, and JSON; ability to build secure, reusable and scalable code and libraries to support applications, services and databases. OREducation:All academic degrees and coursework must be from accredited or pre-accredited institutions. Undergraduate or Graduate Education: Degree in computer science, engineering, information science, information systems management, mathematics, operations research, statistics, or technology management or degree that provided a minimum of 24 semester hours in one or more of the fields identified above and required the development or adaptation of applications, systems or networks.  Grade 11: Ph.D. or equivalent doctoral degreeor3 full years of progressively higher level graduate education leading to a Ph.D. or equivalent doctoral degree. 

Contacts

• Address SMITHSONIAN 60 Garden Street. MS 17 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 United States
• Name: Mary Hebert
• Phone: 617-496-7816
• Email: [email protected]