The Paranal Systems Engineering group is responsible for all Systems Engineering aspects of the Paranal Observatory, including steering and control of observatory projects, system performance management, interface management, and representing Paranal at external projects reviews.

The Paranal Systems Engineering group is comprised of six Systems Engineers and two Systems Scientists. The successful applicant will work in the framework of the system performance management on the problematic of the mitigation of the vibrations that impact the Very Large Telescope Interferometer.

The VLT Interferometer optical train is made of more than 20 mirrors propagating stellar light over more than 100 m. To achieve the scientific goals, the optical path length must be stabilized to within a few tens of nm rms. This is challenging for a constantly evolving infrastructure that was not build solely for interferometry and that contains many sources of vibrations such as pumps, compressors, fans, motors... Mitigating the effect of vibrations is key to the success of the VLTI scientific exploitation and relies on:

• Minimizing the effect of the vibrations sources by reducing the amplitude of the sources, damping their transmission to the infrastructure and in particular to the mirrors of the interferometer.
• Actively correcting for the vibrations using a network of accelerometers and fast actuators.
• Being able to detect changes in the vibration signatures of the telescopes and troubleshoot the issue quickly.