Cloud Platform Engineer in Reading

We are in search of a highly motivated Cloud Platform Engineer (A2) to work on platform engineering and observability for application deployments in the Destination Earth Data Bridges. ECMWF is one of the Entrusted Entities delivering Destination Earth (DestinE), the initiative of the EU to create a digital twin of the planet. The third phase of DestinE covers the period June 2026 to May 2028. Phase 3 will ensure the Climate change Adaptation and Extreme events Digital Twins and the Digital Twin Engine reach a stable production‑grade operational stage, enabling operations with robust quality control as well as continuous evolution, calibration and consolidation. Phase 3 will ensure the ML model of the Earth system piloted in phase 2 is transitioned towards a production‑ready status.

The role sits in the Platform Engineering Team, within the Application Delivery Section of our Computing Department. The Section provides platforms and services that enable ECMWF teams to consume computing resources at different levels (PaaS, SaaS) and to consistently deploy applications with different levels of support to a high degree of quality and reliability. The Section achieves this through innovation in the areas of computer systems administration automation, application deployment and operation, reliability engineering, identity and access management, container orchestration, observability (monitoring, logging and tracing), and PaaS/SaaS application development.

Your responsibilities:

• Deliver and support a container orchestration infrastructure in multiple DestinE Data Bridges.
• Automation of the deployment of open source, commercial and proprietary software to Destination Earth containers, VMs or bare metal.
• Developing observability capabilities for Destination Earth services and for the underlying systems.
• Implement systems to monitor the performance of the Data Bridges PaaS/IaaS and interface with the providers and hosting data centres to ensure system‑level capability and performance.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of observability and event collection and analysis.
• Advocating for reliability engineering within Destination Earth and its partners.
• Participating in regular 24‑hour on‑call rotas for any critical systems and services in the relevant areas (subject to training and contract length).

What we are looking for:

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with a cooperative nature.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills, with a proactive continuous improvement approach.
• Self‑motivated, and able to work with minimal supervision.
• Dedication and enthusiasm to work in a geographically distributed team.
• Ability to work efficiently, and complete diverse tasks in a timely manner.

Your profile:

• Advanced university degree (EQF level 6) or equivalent industry experience.
• Demonstrable knowledge and skills in some of the following:
• Programming (any language) or scripting (Python, Ruby, Perl, Go).
• Cloud Native and Containers (Kubernetes, Helm, Docker).
• Cloud IaaS (OpenStack or similar).
• Software Engineering – Kubernetes application patterns (operators) and Cloud Native architectures (distributed applications, microservices).
• Automation toolchain (Terraform, Ansible or similar).
• Linux system administration.
• Observability, monitoring, logging and analytics, tracing applications.
• DevOps: CI/CD, software engineering, automation pipelines.
• The server, storage and networking components of Cloud applications.
• A working knowledge in some of the following is desirable:
• Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, ELK or similar.
• Application Performance Monitoring.
• NOSQL (MongoDB), SQL (PostgreSQL or MySQL).

Candidates must be able to work effectively in English; applications should be completed in English and interviews will be conducted in English.

Other information:

• Grade remuneration: The successful candidates will be recruited according to the scales of the Co‑ordinated Organisations. Details of salary scales and allowances are available on the ECMWF website.
• Starting date: as soon as possible.
• Candidates are expected to relocate to the duty station, either to Bologna, Italy, or to Reading, UK.
• As a multi‑site organisation, ECMWF has adopted a hybrid organisation model which allows flexibility to staff to mix office working and teleworking, including away from the duty station (within the area of our member states and co‑operating states).

At ECMWF, we consider an inclusive environment as key for our success. We are dedicated to ensuring a workplace that embraces diversity and provides equal opportunities for all, without distinction as to race, gender, age, marital status, social status, disability, sexual orientation, religion, personality, ethnicity and culture. We value the benefits derived from a diverse workforce and are committed to having staff that reflect the diversity of the countries that are part of our community, in an environment that nurtures equality and inclusion.