Graduate Research Assist (RA)

Department: 00810 - Scient Comp & Imag Instit-Oper Responsibilities: ● Work with faculty, staff, and students in designing and developing computational tools in support of research projects. ● Aid in the specification of software requirements in coordination with faculty or team leads. ● Develop user interfaces, APIs with web front-end technologies like HTML5, SCSS, Vue, React, Typescript, D3.js, node.js, chart.js ● Back end server component development with technologies such as Flask, Django, CKAN, ArangoDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and Elasticsearch. ● Create and maintain build, testing, and deployment systems with Git, Github, Slack, Docker, AWS, Circle-CI, webpack, npm and many others. ● Develop high quality and well documented code. ● Build CI/CD workflows to validate changes across multiple targets ● Profile and optimize performance for data throughput and latency ● Interface with collaboration partners and participate actively in a collaborative work environment to turn requirements into optimal solutions on a large scale. ● Contribute actively to team discussions on architectural design and solutions by continuously looking for improvements. ● Research and stay current with project-related scientific literature. ● Identify and implement creative solutions to overcome problems. ● Mentor postdocs, students, and junior software developers for best software practices. ● Support the end-user community by responding to user questions posted on the discussion list, fixing bugs, and incorporating feature requests. ● Help with the project website and discussion boards for user support, developer support, and announcements. ● Contribute to teaching activities by preparing and presenting educational seminars Job Summary: We are seeking a highly talented PhD Student with experience and interest in state-of-the-art AI technologies, data science, and research software engineering, a. This position offers the opportunity to work in a world-renowned research institute alongside faculty, software engineers, PhD students, and PostDocs on the development of cutting-edge AI-ready/agentic infrastructure for data and model discovery, model metadata extraction, and scholarly intelligence. The project will explore conceptual frameworks and system architecture to support data trust in the context of AI-enabled sience workflows. Experience and developing and deploying software is desired. We are extending and maintaining the National Data Platform to support a new generation of discovery capabilities targeting AI-enabled (agentic) science workflows. . Building on ideas pioneered by the Democratizing Data 1 2 project ( insights.ndp.utah.edu ) , this project will explore approaches to discovery data and models that are trusted and fit for use by leveraging contextual information about their use derived from a range of sources including published literature. The approach includes extracting, linking, and presenting evidence from records to help users understand where models are used, how they are applied, what tasks they support, and how they evolve across scientific domains. The successful candidate will contribute directly to the research and implementation of workflows for AI model identification, publication mining, metadata engineering, search and retrieval, and interactive user-facing systems. The role includes support for integration, development, deployment, maintenance, UI/UX, containerization, automation, and system-level optimization. Please contact Jess Tate (jess@sci.utah.edu) for further information. The SCI Institute: The SCI Institute is a world-class research institute located within the new Warnock Engineering Building on the University of Utah campus. We are a highly dynamic, driven group of over 170 faculty, staff, and students. The overarching goals of the SCI Institute’s scientific computing research are to create new techniques, tools, and systems, by which scientists may solve problems affecting various aspects of human…