[FILLED] R&D Engineer on geo-distributed applications -
Application deadline: February 27th, 2023
Practical information
Start: May 2023
Duration: 18 months (CDD)
Supervision: Baptiste Jonglez, Inria, baptiste.jonglez@inria.fr
Team: Stack
Location: IMT Atlantique, Nantes
Salary: from 2800 € / month gross salary (depending on diploma and experience)
Benefits: social security coverage, 2 days of remote work per week, partial reimbursement of public transport costs, vocational training
To apply, send a CV and a cover letter to baptiste.jonglez@inria.fr, we will then schedule an interview (in-person in Nantes if practical, remote otherwise).
Context
STACK is a research group focusing on challenges related to the management and advanced usages of Utility Computing infrastructures (i.e. Cloud, Fog, Edge, and beyond).
This position is funded through OTPaaS, a project funded under the French PIA-4 framework “stratégie d’accélération Cloud” for a duration of 36 months with an overall budget of 56M€. The project targets the design and development of a complete software stack to administrate and use “Cloud to IoT” infrastructures.
Expected work
Your goal will be to explore the design of geo-distributed applications, based on the research work of the STACK team and in collaboration with other members of the team. By definition, geo-distributed applications have components that are deployed in different physical locations. We believe in the “local-first” approach: such applications should be designed to be primarily resilient to network latency and network partitions, while still maintaining the ability of all components to work together as a secondary goal.
For example, here is a non-exhaustive list of possible strategies to explore:
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handle geo-distribution in the storage layer (e.g. Garage)
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handle geo-distribution in the application logic itself (e.g. CRDTs)
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handle geo-distribution through message passing (e.g. Zenoh)
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handle geo-distribution in the infrastructure (e.g. through a service mesh)
The end result will be a prototype demo application that natively supports geo-distribution. Ideally, this application should also integrate well with the rest of the ecosystem developed by the STACK team (distributed orchestration, distributed reconfiguration, energy-aware scheduling, etc)
Open source is a core value of the team: you will rely on open-source projects and will have the opportunity to contribute back to some of these projects. The team has a track record of contributing to large open source projects such as Openstack.
You will be part of a small and flexible team of engineers with frequent interactions, and where sharing knowledge is encouraged. However, you are still free to organize your work as you like.
Skills
A good knowledge of distributed systems is necessary. We also require a good development experience, including best practices (tests, CI, automation…). Development of the prototype itself can be done in any reasonable language.
Curiosity, thinking outside the box and an interest for public research are appreciated.
A good level of written technical English is expected. Day-to-day communication can be done in either French or English.