Software Engineering Director

Johns Hopkins University: Whiting School of Engineering: Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute

Location

Baltimore, MD, 21218; Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus

Open Date

Mar 03, 2023

Description

Background of Organization

The AI-X Foundry at Johns Hopkins is a university-based organization with an ambitious global vision: the intentional collaboration of human and artificial intelligence (AI), with AI learning from humans and humans learning from AI, bringing their complementary strengths together towards the goal of understanding and improving the human condition. The AI-X Foundry – a new cross-divisional organization at Johns Hopkins is administratively managed by the Whiting School of Engineering.

The AI-X Foundry provides a physical and intellectual home for world-class scholars from all disciplines and backgrounds working in artificial intelligence (AI) and its applications. Building on a strong ethical foundation for AI, the AI-X Foundry leverages the deep expertise of its researchers and collaborations with external partners to accomplish its goals. AI-X Foundry activities focus on the foundations of AI and the application domains of Health & Medicine, Safety & Assurance, and Discovery & Inquiry.

The principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are foundational to all AI-X Foundry activities.

The AI-X Foundry will execute an initial multi-year budget of over $300 million and will integrate new and existing centers and institutes into its federated administrative infrastructure.

Specific Duties and Responsibilities

As part of its mission, the AI-X Foundry must have the capacity to create, implement, deploy, and evaluate AI systems with real-world impact in the areas of emphasis.

The Technical Director will help build and lead a seasoned team of research-oriented data scientists, machine learning engineers, and full-stack software engineers serving the AI-X Foundry mission. The director will set the vision and culture for the team and will define the priorities and scope of software development in projects that involve scientific researchers from across the country and the world. Projects can come from all scholarly disciplines and range from fundamental research to projects with very high societal impact. These projects will need advanced solutions requiring the integration of domain expertise with expertise in data science, machine learning, and software engineering to develop scalable software that can be deployed as needed. A particularly important aspect of this team must be communication across the team to take advantage of developments across the institution.

The Technical Director is also expected to help the team incorporate the software industry’s best practices, and to help establish a tool repository for all participants. One part of the AI-X Foundry is the Scientific Software Engineering Center (SSEC), which has support from the Schmidt Futures Foundation, and works towards the establishment of scalable scientific software through the integration of best practices from industry. The Technical Director of the AI-X Foundry will be able to work with SSEC leadership and staff to integrate approaches and concepts from SSEC into the work of the rest of the AI-X Foundry. The technical staff working under the Technical Director are expected to help spin-up new projects, establish guidelines, and provide consulting help for existing projects.

Additional expectations for the position:

Work with staff and leadership of the AI-X Foundry to identify projects suitable for the members of the team; work with the project’s investigators to identify the problems to be solved, to determine their objectives, and oversee the implementation of appropriate methodology; direct data acquisition and reduction; demonstrate superior scope and breadth of research through the creation of new concepts, applications, processes, designs, technologies.
Manage the professional growth and performance development of the team.
Provide technical and professional mentorship and cultivate mentorship among team members at all levels.
Help develop the technical vision for the AI-X Foundry, and develop a culture of technical and scientific excellence, innovation, collaboration, and professionalism.
Provide technical leadership within AI-X Foundry in the application of advanced principles and processes for assigned areas of responsibility (i.e., subject matter, function, type of facility or equipment, or product).
Engage with the Johns Hopkins community and world-class researchers from around the world to understand their needs and priorities.
Engage with the Scientific Software Engineering Center’s Engineering Director, staff members, and the AI-X Foundry Director of Infrastructure to ensure coordination and collaboration between SSEC and broader AI-X Foundry activities.
Lead program management within the AI-X Foundry, which includes program planning, budgeting, contracting, and reporting.
Establish internal development processes and best practices suitable for modern software development in the context of complex scientific collaborations.
Develop project roadmaps, milestones, and frameworks to guide detailed planning and implementation.
Ensure activities are compliant with federal and Johns Hopkins policies, working in conjunction with Johns Hopkins staff and AI-X Foundry leadership.
Leverage existing investments and expertise in IT infrastructure, including network, data center, storage and compute environments, public cloud environments, cybersecurity and systems, management tools and processes. While building requirements for infrastructure, we seek to integrate with IT centers of excellence within the organization.
In conjunction with faculty and AI-X Foundry leadership,
- Develop plans for computational resource infrastructure in support of the AI-X Foundry.
- Ensure master plans and schedules are followed.
- Develop solutions to program challenges.
- Collaborate and coordinate with subject matter experts and stakeholders within the Johns Hopkins administration and across the divisions to conceive and implement multidisciplinary projects.
- Work with the Johns Hopkins overarching structure, processes, and procedures to accomplish multiple project objectives/deliverables and program objectives.
- Present data at internal and external program meetings.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

Master’s degree in a quantitative discipline, e.g., computer science, engineering, astrophysics, bioinformatics, with strong scientific computing and/or mathematics background.
10 years or more experience working in software development and/or data science in large projects in academia, industry, or in the government.
5 years or more experience managing personnel and projects in software development and/or data science.
Experience with modern AI architectures, such as deep networks and transformers, and their applications to different problem categories and input/output data structures.
Experience with modern AI software frameworks, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow and SciKit, including the use of these frameworks for training and evaluating models at scale in distributed, HPC or GPU environments.
Experience in building and operating high performance computing hardware environments, leveraging a combination of Linux, open source and commercial storage & file systems, such as SpectrumScale (GPFS), Lustre, NFS, CIFS, etc. Leverage existing infrastructure solution groups to the greatest degree possible, while bringing novel performance and feature requirements to the appropriate teams for design and build.
Experience in managing large scale cloud computing, including resource management, cost optimization, use of Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and other public and hybrid cloud solutions. Johns Hopkins has a large-scale investment in cloud using major vendors such as AWS and Azure, and a ‘cloud forward’ strategy. Utilize existing cloud centers of expertise while building novel cloud solutions for the advancement of scientific use cases.
Ability to think and work independently, be flexible, and manage multiple priorities simultaneously.
Adept diplomacy and exemplary interpersonal skills.

Equivalency formula for exempt roles: Additional education may substitute for required experience and additional related experience may substitute for required education, to the extent permitted by the Johns Hopkins equivalency formula.

Preferred Qualifications

Doctorate in computer science, engineering, or related field.
15 years or more experience working in software development and/or data science in large projects in academia, industry, or in the government.
10 years or more experience managing personnel and projects in software development and/or data science.

Application Instructions

Applications should include a CV. All application material should be submitted online via Interfolio. Review of applications will continue until the position is filled.

Application Process

This institution is using Interfolio’s Faculty Search to conduct this search. Applicants to this position receive a free Dossier account and can send all application materials, including confidential letters of recommendation, free of charge.

Apply Now on interfolio

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

The Johns Hopkins University is committed to equal opportunity for its faculty, staff, and students. To that end, the university does not discriminate on the basis of sex, gender, marital status, pregnancy, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status or other legally protected characteristic. The university is committed to providing qualified individuals access to all academic and employment programs, benefits and activities on the basis of demonstrated ability, performance and merit without regard to personal factors that are irrelevant to the program involved.