Posting 23-34

Area of Consideration: This position is open to all qualified candidates.

Note: First consideration may be made 14 days after the opening date. This is a career ladder opportunity with promotion potential to grade 13. Selection for this position to be made at the grade 11, 12 or 13 level. Candidates may be non competitively promoted to the next grade level , up to grade 13, upon the recommendation of the supervisor based on classification requirements, satisfactory performance and qualifications of the employee.

Summary:

This is the position of Information Technology Specialist (Back Office Developer) 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 17M scientific articles with more than 159M 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 enhance the ADS back-office architecture, improving the data processing pipelines and the public cloud-based API, as well as developing new functionalities to give support to the search engine and ADS natural language processing / machine learning / deep learning plans.

Duties may include:

1. Function as a part of a team to develop new ADS search features and capabilities, ensuring its reliability and scalability
2. Function as a part of a team to develop new ADS API features and services
3. Apply established data analysis / modeling techniques to explore metrics, and identify improvement opportunities for proactive detection of data problems
4. Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders in the design and development of new capabilities and the maintenance of existing functionality
5. Perform other duties as may be required

In addition to the duties at the grade 11 listed above, duties at the grade 12 may include but are not limited to:

1. Function as a part of a team to develop new ADS data processing pipeline features to expand ADS search capabilities, ensuring its reliability and scalability
2. Design, develop new ADS API features and services 

In addition to the duties at the grade 12, duties at the grade 13 may include but are not limited to:

1. Design, develop new production-ready ADS data processing pipeline features to expand ADS search capabilities, ensuring its reliability and scalability
2. Design, and develop new production-ready ADS API features and services 

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 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 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 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.

 
OR
Education:
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 degree
or
3 full years of progressively higher level graduate education leading to a Ph.D. or equivalent doctoral degree. 

For the latest information on the COVID-19 vaccination requirements and its impact on your application, click on Smithsonian Institution’s Frequently Asked Questions.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE: We will only accept applications online for this position. To view the complete vacancy posting, requirements and the procedures to apply, please visit USAJOBS

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity in our workplace.