The Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA) invites applications for a scientific software engineer position (also known as research software engineer) to start as soon as possible. The position, will be for a duration of at least 2 years; within the framework of the "Knowledge Generation Projects 2022" project PID2022-138896NA-C54 titled "ARRAKIHS: First phase of the next mission of the European Space Agency".

ARRAKIHS (Analysis of Resolved Remnants of Accreted galaxies as a Key Instrument for Halo Surveys) was recently approved as the next European Space Agency (ESA) F-class mission (F is for "fast"). It is the first ESA mission to be led by Spain and is planned for launch around 2030. ARRAKIHS will observe ~100 Milky Way-like galaxies in the optical and infrared, with the objective of unveiling the nature of dark matter and to deepen our knowledge of galaxy formation processes through deep observations.

The successful applicant will be in charge of the low-level implementation of the ARRAKIHS data reduction pipeline; under the supervision of Dr. Mohammad Akhlaghi (ARRAKIHS and OAJ pipeline scientist). The pipeline will retrieve single exposure and uncalibrated images from the ESA archive and will return high-level science-ready deep images (a combination of many calibrated single exposures). Before the ARRAKIHS launch (in 2030), the pipeline will be developed using simulated single-exposure images (provided by other science work packages within the consortium), as well as data from the ground-based demonstrator at the OAJ once it is setup.

The low-level (number crunching) will be done with GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro, an official GNU package: https://gnu.org/s/gnuastro; written in C). The high-level workflow will be using Maneage (https://maneage.org; written in Shell/Makefile). If any necessary feature is lacking, or bugs are found in Gnuastro or Maneage, the successful applicant will also implement/fix them (and publish the implementation). Therefore experience in C programming, Bash scripting, Makefiles and Git version control are critical for this job. The pipeline will be free software (GNU LGPL v3+), and will be published with each ARRAKIHS data release.

For further information, please contact:

Mohammad Akhlaghi – makhlaghi@cefca.es