Ops Engineer

Level of qualifications required : Graduate degree or equivalent

Fonction : Temporary scientific engineer

Level of experience : From 3 to 5 years

Context

Software Heritage is an ambitious nonprofit, entirely Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) initiative that aims at collecting, organizing, preserving for the very long term, and sharing all publicly available software in source code form, together with the corresponding complete development history (e.g., from a Version Control System) where available. The Software Heritage archive already contains more than 13 billion unique source code files and 2.7 billion commits, retrieved from more than 185 million software projects.

The SoftwareHeritage initiative is hosted by INRIA fundation.

Assignment

We are looking for an experienced Ops engineer to develop our operations team. The ideal candidate will have a particular interest in hardware, system administration and large scale infrastructure management.

As a member of the Software Heritage team, the candidate will maintain the Software Heritage stack and infrastructure, design evolutions of the infrastructure and maintain an efficient development environment for our developers.

• Help design and install a new infrastructure for Software Heritage hosted at CINES
• Participate in the specification and deployment of Software Heritage on this new infrastructure
• Consolidate and automate the infrastructure for the next 5 years

Main activities

• Installation, supervision and maintenance of the Software Heritage infrastructure
• Platform deployment and automation
• Support and troubleshooting
• Active participation in team life
• Progress monitoring and reporting on assigned projects
• Interaction with relevant Open Source communities and Software Heritage partners

Skills

• Solid Linux experience on a production environment, preferably at scale
• Experience in networking and hardware management (servers, storage, switches, etc.)
• Experience on Kubernetes or equivalent container orchestration environment.
• Experience with configuration management technologies such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible
• Scalable storage (e.g. Ceph, cloud-based blob storage, ZFS, Swift…)
• Programming experience in Python or other languages
• Good level of English (written and spoken)
• Good interpersonal and communication skills

Benefits package

• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking (after 6 months of employment) and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage

Remuneration

Depending on qualifications and professional experience

Defence Security

Defence Security : This position is likely to be situated in a restricted area (ZRR), as defined in Decree No. relating to the protection of national scientific and technical potential (PPST).Authorisation to enter an area is granted by the director of the unit, following a favourable Ministerial decision, as defined in the decree of 3 July 2012 relating to the PPST. An unfavourable Ministerial decision in respect of a position situated in a ZRR would result in the cancellation of the appointment.

Recruitment Policy

Recruitment Policy : As part of its diversity policy, all Inria positions are accessible to people with disabilities.

Background

Software Heritage is a complex technical architecture (see our documentation), based on many different technologies, which continues to evolve. We do not expect candidates to master all of them, but rather to be open to discovery and learning. Previous knowledge of one or more of the subjects mentioned below will help in the process of getting to grips with the project, but we encourage you to apply whatever your level of experience in these technologies.

• Solid Linux experience on a production environment, preferably at scale
• Experience in networking and hardware management (servers, storage, switches, etc.)
• Experience on Kubernetes or equivalent container orchestration environment.
• Experience with configuration management technologies such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible
• Scalable storage (e.g. Ceph, cloud-based blob storage, ZFS, Swift…)
• Programming experience in Python or other languages
• Good level of English (written and spoken)
• Good interpersonal and communication skills

The ideal candidate will be sensitive to the FOSS culture and ecosystem (use, possible contributions to projects…). We expect self-organization and autonomy skills commensurate with the candidate’s experience. Good system administration practices should be well known or mastered, particularly in the context of FOSS development, and software development should be at least a familiar skill.

About Inria

Inria, the French national institute for research in digital science and technology, supports the French government in national research and innovation strategies in the digital field, acting as Digital Programs Agency. Inria leads over 300 research and innovation projects with its 3,500 scientists, engineers, and support staff, in partnership with universities and the digital ecosystem (businesses, entrepreneurs, and public stakeholders). Together, we explore strategic fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, cloud technologies, digital transformation in healthcare, digital twins, and digital technologies for defence. We develop practical solutions such as software, tech startups, partnerships with national companies, and cutting-edge training programmes. Our goal is to drive scientific, technological, and industrial excellence to ensure France’s digital sovereignty.