Manager, Scientific/R&D User Support Services

This position oversees user support for a widely distributed community of scientists and software developers working on advanced weather forecast models. The position is focused on user-facing technical support services and on development and maintenance of relevant online documentation, training materials, tutorials/videos, and communications platforms; it is not a conventional IT help desk/troubleshooting function. The position requires a breadth of capabilities and experience, including direct, hands-on experience providing or supervising scientific software code improvement services and documentation support for collaborative, community-based software development programs in the physical sciences or closely related fields.

This is a new position; the successful candidate will have the opportunity to create and lead the user support team and to collaborate with colleagues to define standards and establish workflow methodologies. Hiring for this position is contingent on contract award.

Essential functions include:

Software Code Improvement: work directly with external (community) researchers and developers to properly integrate new algorithms into the existing forecast model code base and apply standards to assure maintainability, extensibility, portability and performance

Code and Science-based Documentation: oversee publication and maintenance of user guides, developer guides, coding standards, and code management/version control practices; assist researchers in properly documenting candidate code improvements and the supporting test cases and verification packages used for scientific validation

Ticket System Administration: Implement and manage an automated ticket management system for provenance traceability, escalation, and resolution

Communication Platform Administration: implement and administer wiki and user forums that support collaborative, community-based scientific software development

Tutorials Delivery: collaborate with colleagues to develop video tutorials for scientists and developers seeking to access and use community resources, test candidate code improvements, and properly document their code

Help Desk Services: train and manage help desk staff and ensure they have resources needed to quickly resolve or properly escalate user support requests

Code Base Metrics Tracking: Create and maintain metrics to track user-contributed improvements in the code base

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant technical field
• Minimum three years’ experience providing user support services to researchers and scientific software developers working on complex software development projects
• Experience supervising or providing code improvement services to meet defined standards of maintainability, extensibility, and portability
• Experience using and maintaining automated ticket management systems
• Experience developing and maintaining a variety of documentation including user guides, developer guides, coding standards, software test plans and test reports, and software management/version control procedures
• Experience supporting NOAA, UCAR, or NSF weather R&D programs strongly preferred