The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project is a global collaboration of around 170 computing centres in more than 40 countries, linking up national and international grid infrastructures. As computing evolves for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) era, WLCG faces a rapidly growing computing demand alongside increasingly heterogeneous hardware environments (CPUs, GPUs, Cloud, and HPC).

To guide procurement, resource pledging, performance studies and accounting, the High Energy Physics (HEP) community relies on domain-specific benchmarking tools to accurately measure and compare computing resources. As a Graduate / Applied Engineer (QUEST), you will join our team in CERN’s IT Department to support the development, operation, and user support for WLCG HEPScore benchmarking services. You will contribute to key activities, helping to build and maintain the next-generation benchmarking software stack for the WLCG community.

Your responsibilities

• Software Development: Actively contribute to the development, packaging, and distribution of the HEP benchmark software stack. Integrate, profile, and validate production-level GPU application workloads from LHC experiment software (e.g., event generation, simulation, fast inference, and HLT).
• Containerisation: Build, test, and maintain container images of HEP workloads using automated GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
• Service Maintenance & Enhancement: Ensure the smooth operation of the core benchmarking infrastructure and data ingestion services using Puppet, GitLab CI/CD, ActiveMQ, Logstash, OpenSearch, Kibana, Apache Spark and Grafana.
• Performance Analysis: Collect, process, and analyse grid-wide benchmark data to evaluate performance scaling across diverse CPU/GPU architectures and server configurations.
• Technical Support: Provide technical support and documentation to the WLCG user community.

Be sure to meet the eligibility criteria

• You are a national of a CERN Member State or Associate Member State. Currently, we cannot consider applications from Pakistani, Lithuanian, Latvian, Cypriot, Croatian and Turkish nationals, as the ceiling defined under Article II.5 of the Associate Membership Agreement has been reached.
• By the application deadline, you have a master’s degree with 2 to 6 years of professional experience since graduation or a PhD with a maximum of 3 years of professional experience since graduation. You are not eligible with only a bachelor’s degree.
• You have never had a CERN fellow or graduate contract before.
• Please pay attention to the additional criteria and requirements for this specific position and mentioned above.