Scientist for Distributed Storage Management and Development

For our location in Hamburg we are seeking:

Remuneration Group 13 | Limited: 31.10.2028 | Starting date: earliest possible | ID: FHMA040/2025 | Deadline: 11.01.2026 | Full-time/Part-time | Remote work possible

DESY, with more than 2900 employees at its two locations in Hamburg and Zeuthen, is one of the world's leading research centres. Its research focuses on decoding the structure and function of matter, from the smallest particles of the universe to the building blocks of life. In this way, DESY contributes to solving the major questions and urgent challenges facing science, society and industry. With its ultramodern research infrastructure, its interdisciplinary research platforms and its international networks, DESY offers a highly attractive working environment in the fields of science, technology and administration as well as for the education of highly qualified young scientists.

This project focuses on analysing and optimising scientific data flows in preparation for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). It addresses the growing data management and processing demands of future LHC experiments by developing scalable strategies for efficient data access, distribution, and storage across distributed computing infrastructures.

The central component of this project is dCache. The dCache.org is an international collaboration of computer scientists to provide eponymous open source software for storing and retrieving huge amounts of data distributed among a large number of heterogeneous server nodes, under a single virtual filesystem tree with a variety of standard access methods, including NFSv4.1 (pNFS), WebDAV and FTP protocols. dCache.org products are in use around the world by a large variety of scientific communities. The Software is written in Java programing language using microservice-like architecture and based on widely adopted components, like Jetty, Spring, Zookeeper, Apache Kafka and others. The German section of dCache.org is part of DESY IT. DESY operates multiple instances of dCache providing more than 150PiB of data and each is part of world wide interconnected scientific communities with about 10000 users.

The successful candidate will design and evaluate data processing pipelines, contribute to the development of dCache, and collaborate closely with international research groups. This position offers an opportunity to work at the intersection of large-scale data systems, advanced computing technologies, and experimental particle physics - contributing directly to the success of next-generation scientific discoveries at the HL-LHC.