The Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is one of the most dynamic university campuses in Europe and ranks among the top 20 universities worldwide. The EPFL employs 6,000 people supporting the three main missions of the institutions: education, research and innovation. The EPFL campus offers an exceptional working environment at the heart of a community of 16,000 people, including over 10,000 students and 3,500 researchers from 120 different countries.

Software engineer – Lead Frontend Engineer (W/M)

Your mission :

The EPFL Blue Brain Project (BBP), situated on the Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland, applies advanced neuroinformatics, data analytics, high-performance computing and simulation-based approaches to the challenge of understanding the structure and function of the mammalian brain in health and disease. The BBP provides the community with regular releases of data, models and tools to accelerate neuroscience discovery and clinical translation through open science and global collaboration.



In this context, the Neuroinformatics Software Engineering team has built and open sourced the
Blue Brain Nexus platform to organize, store and process exceptionally large volumes of data in a semantic way and support usage by a broad number of users.



Going beyond the specific use case of the BBP, Blue Brain Nexus is designed to be agnostic of the data domain it is applied to, making it suitable for semantic data management within the scientific community as well as in many other industries. Blue Brain Nexus is already being used by scientists and researchers all over the world.



You would be joining the Neuroinformatics Software Engineering team, which is in charge of designing and developing the future of the Blue Brain Nexus platform, as a
Lead Frontend Engineer.



You will be tasked with designing and creating rich web applications to facilitate the work of scientists such as sharing and searching and leveraging data, analytics dashboards and visualizations. You are a creative javascript developer with leadership experience, passionate about open-source software and are familiar with the movements in the web development community. You are comfortable kick-starting new software and are excited about greenfield projects. You have a product-oriented approach to designing user-centric and delightful software.



If you would like to read more about what we do, we have open-sourced Blue Brain Nexus (read the EPFL press release) and published an interview on the role of Neuroinformatics at BBP (read the Technology Networks’ interview).




Main duties and responsibilities include :

• Technical supervision and mentoring of the frontend engineers,


• Design and development of user-facing software, such as deployment administration and knowledge graph exploration (nexus web), data registration, visualization, and semantic search,


• Design and development of web libraries (nexus-js) and frameworks to enable others to easily build nexus-based user interfaces,


• Active collaboration with our Stakeholders, Product Manager, Platform Architect and Users to define the software to be built,


• Participate in the definition of the platform roadmap, sprint planning and specification of the platform services,


• All aspects of modern software development life-cycle: testing, continuous integration, DevOps, documentation and direct user support,


• Implement best-practices for maintainable software development,


• Participate in the recruitment of new talents and onboarding the new team members,


• Participate in presentations, training, and technical discussions inside BBP and at conferences and workshops.

Experience and preferred skills:

• Modern Javascript and preferably Typescript,


• React and other Javascript frameworks,


• Modern Javascript ecosystem,


• HTML and CSS knowledge,


• Working with REST APIs,


• Unit and integration testing,


• Agile software development.

Experience in any of the following areas would be a plus:

• Developing data visualization applications (d3.js, three.js, WebGL...),


• Making compelling user experience and UI design,


• DevOps technologies (Docker, OpenShift, Jenkins),


• Semantic web technologies (RDF/OWL, SPARQL, RDF Triple Stores),


• Graph Databases (Property Graphs, RDF Triple Stores),


• Knowledge of other programming languages, notably Python, Bash, and Scala.

Profile:

• Master degree in computer science or equivalent professional experience,


• At least 3 years experience in a similar technical leadership role,


• Excellent command of the English language, both written and spoken. French would be a plus.

We offer :

• Opportunity to work on open source software with a growing community of users,


• An internationally visible and rising project in simulation-based research in neuroscience using supercomputers,


• A young, dynamic, exceptionally inter-disciplinary, and international working environment,


• A beautiful working environment, based at Campus Biotech near the lakeside in Geneva,


• Opportunities for skill development through our sharing-oriented team, training and conferences.


• Delicious coffee and a lot of fun.

Start date :

As soon as possible
Term of employment :

Fixed-term (CDD)
Duration :

1 year, renewable
Remark :

Only candidates who applied through EPFL website or our partner Jobup’s website will be considered.apply online