Missions

We are looking for a research engineer to work on the development and maintenance of software tools as part of the ERC grant MORPHOFBD, at the Institute of Biology of the École Normale Supérieure (Paris, France). The successful candidate will work directly with Joëlle Barido-Sottani and with the other researchers hired as part of the MORPHOFBD project. The overall aim of the grant is to develop and implement new methods to study past evolution using information from the fossil record. MORPHOFBD will focus on Bayesian phylogenetic inference, a class of statistical methods used to reconstruct the Tree of Life. Most of the development work will be done within the inference software BEAST2 (https://www.beast2.org/), which is implemented in Java and uses XML configuration files. BEAST2 is a collaborative project with more than 20 developers spread over different teams in France, Switzerland and New Zealand.

Activités

The primary task will be to assist the team in all development tasks involved in the research project, including the design of new implementations, programming and testing tasks, and maintenance and bugfixing. The engineer will also propose improvements to the existing implementations to improve performance or useability. All development tasks will follow good programming practices, in particular the use of git/github, as well as appropriate documentation and testing.

Compétences

We are looking for a candidate with demonstrated experience in programming and software engineering, able to work in an interdisciplinary environment with non-programmers. Previous experience with research software, statistical methods or the Java programming language will be appreciated. Good communication skills in English (Level B2 at least) are required. Some knowledge of evolutionary biology will be helpful but is not required.

Contexte de travail

This contract is for a period of 1 year, renewable 3 times for a total length of 4 years. This project will take place in Hélène Morlon's group at the Institute of Biology of the École Normale Supérieure (https://www.ibens.bio.ens.psl.eu/). The IBENS is a multidisciplinary research center in Biology with more than 300 staff members, conveniently located in the Latin Quarter in downtown Paris. The centre develops research in a wide range of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, ecology, computational biology, genetics, and comparative genomics.

Contraintes et risques

No particular risk. Short (1-2 weeks) trips in France or Europe can be planned depending on the needs of the project.