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Harrison McMillan is seeking a Senior Software Engineer (EL1 Equivalent) to work with a Federal Government Department in Canberra.
Job
The Department develops and maintains the Australian Geospatial Reference Frame (AGRS), including national gravity and geoid modelling systems that underpin accurate height reference surfaces across Australia.
This role will modernise and operationalise core geodetic and gravity software by upgrading legacy dependencies, improving security and maintainability, introducing automated testing and standardised documentation, and ensuring consistent, reliable outputs across platforms such as AWS, NCI and other Linux and windows local machines. The developer will also uplift gravity gridding and geoid modelling code into robust, automated pipelines to support repeatable national-scale model production and resilient operational services on NCI.
Key duties and responsibilities
* Modernise AGRS tools and services and national adjustments by updating legacy dependencies, improving security, introducing automated unit tests, standardising documentation, ensuring consistent outputs across platforms such as AWS and NCI and improving maintainability across tools including DynAdjust, GDA2020, GeodePy, rdsinex, sinex2epoch, ANUBIS, and other utilities
* Uplift existing gravity gridding and geoid modelling code into a robust, operational pipeline environment in NCI
Essential
* Senior software engineering on scientific codebases. Demonstrated experience modernising and maintaining (e.g. Python, C++ based) scientific or geospatial software, including refactoring legacy code while preserving numerical outputs. This includes expertise with CMake/Make for building and deploying C/C++ applications; Python packaging tools such as pip and related ecosystems; parallelisation and vectorisation techniques (e.g., OpenMP, multithreading); memory and I/O performance tuning; and hands on use of high-performance numerical libraries including BLAS, LAPACK, Eigen, SciPy, and NumPy
* Experience in running scientific workflows and parallel processing workloads on both NCI and AWS, and demonstrated capability in build and packaging processes across multiple platforms and environments
* Automated testing and reproducibility. Demonstrated delivery of automated unit/integration tests and reproducible builds, including CI workflows and clear test strategy for numerical code (tolerances, regression tests)
* Operational pipeline development. Experience turning research style scripts into robust, automated pipelines (batch processing, configuration management, logging, error handling, retries, provenance), ideally for national scale or high-volume processing
* Documentation and developer enablement. Ability to produce clear, standardised documentation (user and developer docs), including onboarding notes and runbooks to support ongoing operations and handover
Desirable criteria
* Geodesy / gravity / GNSS domain exposure. Any experience with geodesy, gravity, geoid modelling, GNSS processing, reference frames, or similar numerical geospatial domains
* Software release practices. Experience packaging and releasing tools (versioning, semantic release, changelogs, artifact publishing) and maintaining stable, traceable releases
This role is based in Canberra and requires a Baseline Clearance