WO874 Research Data Analyst

Description

Primary Purpose: To support data infrastructure and data centered applications as integral parts of the Global Water Futures Observatories (GWFO) (https://gwfo.ca) program.

Nature of Work: You will be a member of the GWFO Data Management team and under the supervision of the Data Management Team Lead.

Typical Duties or Accountabilities:

- Becoming fully knowledgeable on the workings of our existing and future telemetry systems of our network of observatories, and the various processes by which real-time data is acquired and deposited into our COTS relational database system (WISKI), and helping to add detailed documentation on these workings;
- The ability to detect, troubleshoot, and back-propagate missing data whenever outages occur at any one of several stages in the telemetry systems (especially upon notification by a technician);
- Becoming fully knowledgeable on the architecture and programming of the GWFNet central metadata catalogue (with assistance from the IT Coordinator/Data Management Team Lead),
- Adding and maintaining highly detailed records on observatory networks, sites, stations, journal and dataset publications, etc. into the GWFNet Data Catalogue (https://gwfnet.net), and participating in design discussions of new forms of metadata records as required;
- Serving as a backup programmer of GWFNet and the GWFO integration site (and serve as a backup and successor)
- Helping researchers to follow best practices and standards for long-term data stewardship, including backup, efficiency of storage utilization and reduction of redundancy;
- Ensuring that stored data remains readily accessible to internal and external stakeholders;
- Becoming familiar with large but well-known, important datasets, and helping to identify opportunities for sharing these across the Projects towards efficiency and massive reduction of duplication;
- Becoming familiar with our GWFO Data Policy and building strong internal relationships with project researchers and stakeholders and giving advice on complying with the Data Policy; and,
- Participating in the development and delivery of Data Management webinars, posters, and presentations on data management best practices, our data infrastructure, and the appropriate and efficient use of our HPC computing resources.
- Assisting with the maintenance of user accounts on in-house file servers, Compute Canada HPC clusters, and on the Copernicus cluster.
- Assisting with monitoring fair account usage of researchers on Compute Canada HPC clusters.
- Assisting project stakeholders in organizing and preparing their data for submission into federated repositories (such as FRDR), ensuring completeness of metadata prior to curator review and entry of associated metadata into GWFNet;
- Performing surveillance checking that telemetry systems are operating and depositing real-time data (WISKI database http://giws.usask.ca/KistersWeb/main.php public sign on is with “public” and “public”); and,
- Helping with regular monitoring of disk drive space on large internal storage systems.

Education and Experience: A Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a field related to hydrology and/or environmental science with strong computer science skills is required with a minimum of 3 years experience. Training in Linux, SQL databases, C# asp net mvc, Python and/or other programming languages are considered to be strong assets.

Skills:

- Absolutely must possess an always-friendly, positive attitude with the ability to work independently and demonstrated ability to work well in a team setting (proposing and defending own ideas while graciously accepting ideas from others)
- Must possess a keen willingness and affinity to learn
- Excellent problem-solving, and analytical skills
- Excellent computer skills in general
- Must be familiar with relational database systems (e.g., MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL)
- Must have working knowledge and at least some experience with Linux
- Must have solid computer programming and scripting experience (particularly in C#, Python, C/C++, Bash, and other scripting)
- Ability to propose commonsense approaches to difficult challenges (e.g., troubleshooting telemetry data outages, ameliorating disk storage shortages, proposing metadata templates); able to work in an imperfect context with iterative improvement
- Excellent documentation and communication skills
- Ability to turn on “being meticulous”, e.g. when entering records into GWFNet or when helping to create README files and other metadata for data publication submissions into, e.g., the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR)

Assets:
Any of the following skills would be considered strong assets:

- C# ASP .NET MVC (strong asset)
- MATLAB/R
- Fieldwork experience
- Experience with geographic location data

Inquiries regarding this position can be directed to Joni Onclin at joni.onclin@usask.ca

Department: Global Water Futures (O)
Status: Term 1 year with the possibility of extension
Employment Group: ASPA
Full Time Equivalent (FTE): 1.0
Salary: The salary range, based on 1.0 FTE, is $52,050.00 - 81,328.00 per annum. The starting salary will be commensurate with education and experience.
Salary Family (if applicable): Information Technology
Salary Phase/Band: Phase 1
Posted Date: 2/7/2025
Closing Date: 4/7/2025 at 6:00 pm CST
Number of Openings: 1
Work Location: On Campus

The University is committed to employment equity, diversity, and inclusion, and are proud to support career opportunities for Indigenous peoples to reflect the community we serve. We are dedicated to recruiting individuals who will enrich our work and learning environments. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, in accordance with Canadian immigration requirements, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority. We are committed to providing accommodations to those with a disability or medical necessity. If you require an accommodation to participate in the recruitment process, please notify us and we will work together on the accommodation request. We continue to grow our partnerships with Indigenous communities across the province, nationally, and internationally and value the unique perspective that Indigenous employees provide to strengthen these relationships. Verification of Indigenous Membership/Citizenship at the University of Saskatchewan is led and determined by the deybwewin | taapwaywin | tapwewin: Indigenous Truth policy and Standing Committee in accordance with the processes developed to enact the policy. Successful candidates that assert Indigenous membership/citizenship will be asked to complete the verification process of Indigenous membership/citizenship with documentation. The University of Saskatchewan’s main campus is situated on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis. We pay our respects to the First Nations and Métis ancestors of this place and reaffirm our relationship with one another. Together, we are uplifting Indigenization to a place of prominence at the University of Saskatchewan.