Senior Application Developer

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Job Summary

The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) is the science center for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program and is located within IPAC on the Caltech campus. IPAC, in the Physics, Math, and Astronomy Division at Caltech (www.caltech.edu), provides science operations, user support, data and archive services, and scientific vision to enhance discovery with observatories both in space and on the ground. NExScI (https://nexsci.caltech.edu/), as part of IPAC, is responsible for the development and operations of the data reduction pipeline and archive for the NEID (NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler Spectroscopy) high precision radial velocity instrument on the WIYN (Wisconsin, Indiana, Yale, and NOIRLab) telescope, the NASA Exoplanet Archive, and the Keck Observatory Archive.

NExScI is seeking a full-time Senior Application Developer to design and implement a web-based environment that enables users to analyze precision radial velocity data from the Keck Observatory Archive, the NEID Archive, the ExoFOP, the NASA Exoplanet Archive, and other data sources worldwide. This is a full-time, one-year term position.

This web-based environment will allow users to leverage precision radial velocity measurements to search for new exoplanets and to characterize the masses and orbits of known exoplanets. The person in this role will help define and guide the scientific and technical direction of the integrated user analysis environment. This work will involve close collaboration with the science and engineering teams at NExScI and IPAC, contributing to the long-term strategy for community-driven data services at NExScI.

Essential Job Duties

Contribute to the vision, design, and implementation of a public-facing data service that unifies and streamlines access to existing NExScI data services, including the NASA Exoplanet Archive, NEID Archive, ExoFOP, and the Keck Observatory Archive, while also developing a user analysis environment for precision radial velocity data.

• Document the goals, requirements, and resource needs for the development and deployment of the project.
• Design and recommend hardware architectures aligned with project requirements, including storage, compute, networking, and web services for development, testing, and production environments.
• Identify and integrate modern software solutions-both commercial and internally developed-that meet the functional and performance objectives of the radial velocity data service.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to ensure new systems integrate seamlessly with existing NExScI and IPAC infrastructure.
• Scoping and supporting efforts to adopt modern DevOps tools and software development practices for this project and across NExScI services.
• Participate in the strategic exploration of emerging technologies for this project and for NExScI projects, including potential applications of AI and large language models (LLMs) within internal workflows and public platforms.

Basic Qualifications

If you have the following in your background, then we want to hear about your interest in joining our team:

• PhD in astronomy, physics, computer science, engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Demonstrated capabilities in exoplanet astrophysics
• At least 7 years of experience in software development, systems engineering, or technical project coordination.
• Strong familiarity with Linux-based systems and scripting (e.g., Python), as well as basic database or infrastructure management.
• Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively across multidisciplinary teams.
• General understanding of the software/system development lifecycle and long-term resource planning.

Preferred Qualifications

• Beyond the basic qualifications, there are additional skills and experiences which are relevant to this position. Any of the following might give you a head start here, but even if these do not describe you or your experience, we would still like to hear from you!
• Demonstrated capabilities in radial velocity techniques for the discovery and characterization of exoplanets.
• 10or more years of experience developing research software systems or managing scientific data workflows.
• 5 or more years of experiencedesigning or maintaining large-scale scientific data archives or analysis pipelines.
• Familiarity with cloud services (e.g., AWS, Azure), containerized environments (e.g., Docker), and continuous integration/deployment workflows (e.g GitHub actions, Jenkins).
• Demonstrated understanding of the full development lifecycle of technical projects, from initial system architecture through implementation, testing, deployment, and long term maintenance.
• Experience working with or supporting data platforms such as the NASA Exoplanet Archive, NEID Archive, ExoFOP, or the Keck Observatory Archive to conduct exoplanet research.
• Experience deploying LLM-driven solutions for interacting with large datasets, workflow automation, and/or community-facing tools.

Required Documents

• Resume
• Cover Letter