AP10-08

Grade: A2/A3, according to the scales of the Co-ordinated Organisations.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is an international organisation supported by 31 States*. Its prime objectives are the operational production of analyses, medium-range forecasts of weather and ocean waves and seasonal forecasts as well as scientific and technical research directed to the improvement of these forecasts. ECMWF operates a large computing facility including supercomputers, data archiving systems and networks. For details see:

The Networking and Computer Security Section provides and supports ECMWF’s networking infrastructure and is also in charge of the design, development and support of applications used to provide secure communications (such as data transfer and job submission) between ECMWF and remote sites.

The selected candidate will be assigned to the Networking and Computer Security Section of the Computer Division and will take part in the software development and support activities of the Section. The main duties will include the following:

The successful candidate will design, configure, tune and support a suite of J2EE Java applications developed in-house that allows the timely and secure transmission of files to more than a hundred destinations worldwide and enables users to submit operational jobs remotely to ECMWF’s High-Performance Computing Facility. He or she will work closely with technical contact points at the remote sites.

The successful candidate will also take an active role in the support activities of the Section, in particular by troubleshooting TCP/IP problems as well as providing support in the administration of a small number of Highly Available (HA) Linux servers that provide basic services such as DNS and network monitoring.

The successful candidate will also provide general day-to-day support in the area of responsibility, including, on a regular basis, 24-hour on-call support.

A university education to degree standard or equivalent is required, coupled with at least five years of relevant professional experience. The successful candidate should have strong Java, J2EE and SQL knowledge and experience in application design.

Experience in or knowledge of some of the following is a distinct advantage: Ajax, GWT toolkit and performance tuning of MySQL and PostgreSQL. Basic knowledge of TCP/IP and a willingness to acquire in-depth TCP/IP troubleshooting and tuning abilities is required.

The successful candidate should be highly professional, proactive and have excellent analytical skills; good inter-personal skills are essential for this position, which involves direct interaction with internal users as well as external system administrators.

Staff are normally recruited from among the nationals of the following Member and Co‑operating States: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom.

The working languages of ECMWF are English, French and German; fluency in English is essential.

For Grade A2: within the range of £3,795.24 to £5,069.79 basic salary per month net of tax.

For Grade A3: within the range of £4,683.01 to £6,333.06 basic salary per month net of tax.

In principle, a staff member will be engaged at the lowest step of the lower grade of the post for which he or she is selected.

A deduction is made from the basic salary for the Pension Scheme and for Partial Invalidity (currently 8.8% for the Pension Scheme and 0.2% for Partial Invalidity). A further 1.46% of basic salary and related allowances is currently deducted for the ECMWF Supplementary Health Insurance Scheme.

Where applicable: household allowance of 6% of basic salary; children’s allowance of £214.41 per child per month; expatriation allowance of 14% or 18% of basic salary for expatriates; education allowance for children of expatriates is added.

Length of contract: Maximum of four years for initial contract, with the possibility of renewal.

Applications: Application forms in word format can be downloaded from here (162kb) and completed on-line. If you download, you may (if near to the closing date) e-mail the completed form only back to ECMWF at jobs@ecmwf.int. Please note, however, that you must still send your full application form together with all the attachments to ECMWF by post. Under no circumstances should you e-mail your attachments.

Closing date: Completed applications for this post must reach the Personnel Section of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts not later than 22 April 2010.

Software Analyst in the Networking and Computer Security Section