Senior Technologist

Are you passionate about IT, science, technology and engineering?

Do you enjoy building and learning about systems, even outside of work (like homelabbing)?

Got a background in an IT related field (including software)?

Do you have a curious mind?

Do you want to build and maintain IT Lego and get paid to do it?

This may be the role for you!

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Role Summary

NPL is looking to build a team to support our scientific projects with their IT system needs. On a daily basis, you'll be working as part of a team of similar minded and capable IT professionals to apply your existing software, hardware, networking and security skills to design, build and maintain IT solutions to meet user needs in a science heavy environment, and blueprint what you build so it can be reused for other systems.

This is a role suited towards someone with a passion for IT, wherein you will be expected to make technical decisions, implement them and own the outcomes, always seeking to improve. We are looking for someone who can both deliver and design solutions that can be understood, supported and maintained by others in the wider IT team.

This is not a role for someone who simply implements predefined textbook solutions. You will be expected to understand scientific requirements, translate them into robust technical designs with a focus on user needs, and make engineering decisions with a high degree of autonomy. You should be comfortable operating across both hands-on delivery and solution architecture.

The solutions you design and build will be provided as services by the wider IT team to our internal customers, and we expect them to be run with formality, expectation, reliability, predictability and maintainability. To do this, you must have a solid grasp of customer requirements, technical judgement and excellent communication skills with the customer and the wider IT team.

Skills and Knowledge

You'll be working with a lot of software and hardware in the role. Knowledge of the tooling is desirable but not essential. You must be comfortable learning unfamiliar technologies quickly. We'll support this through giving you dedicated time and on-the-job training.

Software and Platforms

• Linux
• Docker
• Python
• Microsoft Azure
• GitLab
• FastAPI
• Ansible
• Node-RED
• Traefik
• Grafana
• Loki
• Prometheus
• MikroTik RouterOS
• BookStack
• Draw.io
• FreshService ITSM

Hardware

• Routers
• Switches
• Firewalls
• Micro Form-Factor PCs
• Single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi
• Mini clusters of NUCs
• Large-scale HDD and SSD storage systems

Nature of the Job

The nature of the job will be to help projects with the underlying IT systems that facilitate experiments and research, such as:

• Getting data from point A to point B, anywhere in the world.
• Building a sensor acquisition system
  • For air quality monitoring?
  • For temperature monitoring?
  • or factory noise monitoring?
  • ... or for any other use case our scientists may come up with!
• Enabling remote control of instruments in the field (sometimes actually in a field)
• Helping build systems to visualise and present data either in post, or during experiments using technologies like timeseries databases and Grafana.
• Sharing said data (and access) with collaborators and partners.
• Building proof-of-concept systems and demos for viability studies and and project bids.
• Advising scientists and engineers on data processing pipelines.
• Building proof-of-concept instrument automation systems.
• Implementing off-the-shelf containerised applications in an NPL-specific environment with customisations, IaC configurations, and resilience.
• Helping scientists containerise existing applications and provide and support a platform to host them.

Principles

Core to the role, is the principle of "you build it, you own it" spread across the team. We adopt a site reliability engineering mindset, approach, and practice to our work. We look to eliminate single points of failure and avoid those midnight calls of "the service is down" at all costs. From a technical perspective, this means self-healing services, failovers, redundancy, and high availability are core to our architecture and operations. From a people perspective, we are all expected to be able to maintain all the services we have. Nobody going on annual leave should result in an operational problem.

Core to the team, is the principle of individual accountability and shared reward. If you win, everyone wins. It's in our interests to make sure that everyone on the team can support each other, and the services we provide. Documentation of processes, solutions, and systems will be the main enabler of other people in the team, so your written English, ability to communicate visually with diagrams, and author documents in such a way they can be followed and understood by others is instrumental to the role.

Core to the team, is the principle of learn once, teach many. At NPL, curiosity is valued and knowledge is shared. When someone discovers a new technology, technique or idea, they're encouraged to bring it back to the team through demos, toolbox talks, whiteboard sessions and informal workshops. We actively make time for this because we believe the fastest way for everyone to grow is to learn from each other's real-world experiences.

Core to NPL, are our company values: Give it our all, Nurture and respect, Keep it simple, Get connected, and Be bold. These are at the heart of what we do, and they shape the way we interact, develop our people and celebrate success.

Absolutely vital to the role is to be seen as an expert that your fellow IT colleagues can look up to, seek advice from and ultimately emulate as an example of a true IT professional.

Previous Experience with a Good Fit

People who may be a good fit for this role could come from a wide range of practical, hands-on backgrounds. This might include school or college sysadmins who are used to doing a lot with limited resources, SME IT sysadmins in similar environments, former start-up IT or software professionals looking for greater stability, or people whose formal career has been outside IT but who have built strong technical capability through curiosity and hobby projects. Homelabbers, IT security professionals who want to build better systems, people who have moved across several IT disciplines, and automation engineers or manufacturing IT specialists may all bring the breadth, adaptability and practical judgement needed to succeed in this role. Don't worry if you're not one of these, we'll check out your experience and look for similar traits.

Responsibilities

Key responsibilities include:

• Reviewing incoming requests from internal customers and making determination on whether their requests can be solved using existing capabilities, combinations of existing capabilities, or something new.
• Designing, documenting, building, sharing, and operating IT solutions and services, at pace, across the full tech stack from infrastructure to frontend and handing over long term solutions to operational IT teams.
• Designing, documenting, building, sharing, and operating processes to support IT solutions to reduce personnel single-point-of-failure.
• Facilitating the transition of services into NPL's IT operations team where there is a need for them to exist longer than their agreed lifetime.
• Writing and maintaining small pieces of production-quality software in alignment with enterprise software quality standards.
• Working across NPL functions to gather user stories, analyse feasibility, and operate in an agile team to deliver value sooner and focus on setting up projects for easy expansion and evolution.
• Review code of other team members to ensure effectiveness, quality, and maintainability.
• Writing short whitepapers on technology and solutions to highlight key benefits, trade-offs, and facilitate knowledge sharing within NPL.