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 – Frontend Web Developer (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.



The aim of the Blue Brain Project is to build accurate, biologically detailed, digital reconstructions, and simulations of the rodent brain. The brain is one of the biggest Big Data problems we have today. Therefore, the Neuroinformatics Software Engineering team recently 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 developing the future of the Blue Brain Nexus platform, as a
Software engineer - Frontend Web Developer (W/M).



You will be tasked with designing and creating rich web applications to facilitate the work of scientists such as sharing and searching and visualizing data. You are a javascript developer passionate about open-source software and are familiar with the movements in the web development community. 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 recently announced the open-sourcing of 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 :

• Build user-friendly websites to facilitate the dissemination of scientific data to the worldwide neuroscience community,


• Contribute to scope definition/refinement and website design in alignment with existing graphical guidelines,


• Leverage the data integrated into our instance of Blue Brain Nexus to present them on the website,


• Features of these websites may include:

○Intuitive navigation through complex scientific domain,

○Searching for scientific data (full-text and faceted search leveraging document stores such as Elastic Search),

○Presentation of search results, both in the form of summary tables as well as detailed pages

○Create meaningful scientific visualisation component,

○Enabling user to download scientific data,

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


• Implement best-practices for maintainable software development.

Your profile :


Experience and preferred skills:

• Expertise in modern Javascript and preferably Typescript,


• Experience with React and other Javascript frameworks,


• Well-versed in the modern Javascript ecosystem,


• Experience using the input of a graphical designer to build a website,


• Knowledge of static site generators,


• Experience with version control and workflows with git


• Solid HTML and CSS knowledge


• Experience working with REST APIs,


• Agile software development, unit and integration testing.

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

• Experience in developing data visualization applications (d3.js, three.js, WebGL...),


• Experience in making compelling user experience and UI design,


• Document stores (ElasticSearch)


• Semantic web technologies (RDF/OWL, SPARQL, 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 of frontend software development,


• 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.

Start date :

As soon as possible
Term of employment :

Fixed-term (CDD)
Duration :

6 month project
Remark :

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