IT Security Engineer

The University of Basel is among the leading research universities worldwide, home to about 13'000 students and 4'300 researchers in 7 faculties. sciCORE is the center for scientific computing at the University of Basel and one of the technological platforms of SIB - Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. The mission of sciCORE is to support scientists at the University of Basel and associated institutes in research domains with high computational demands. Current projects range from life sciences and medicine to physics, chemistry, economy and humanities.

sciCORE operates a scientific HPC environment consisting of a Linux cluster, a large-scale high-performance storage system, a DMZ hosting environment for web-accessible scientific services and a secure HPC environment (sciCOREmed) suitable for research with sensitive data, such as biomedical research. sciCOREmed is one of the infrastructure nodes of the national project BioMedIT, supporting the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) initiative. In the development of its IT security capacity, sciCORE collaborates closely with the central IT services of the University of Basel and with BioMedIT partners in Zürich (ETH, Leonhard Med) and Lausanne (SIB, SENSA).

In order to consolidate its IT security framework, sciCORE is looking for an IT Security Engineer (80-100%). The work contract will be associated with the University of Basel.

Your position

With the active support from our team, our new collaborator will:

• Lead the development and implementation of IT security processes within sciCORE
• Conduct internal integrated security reviews
• Propose IT security improvements based on risk analysis
• Maintain active knowledge of current threats and best practices in IT security
• Support the local team in configuration and monitoring of security-critical services
• Maintain internal documentation on IT security aspects
• Actively collaborate with IT security specialists in the SPHN/BioMedIT network
• Contribute to coordinated practical tests (e.g. penetration testing), including reporting
• Participate in technical working groups defining common security guidelines
• Develop processes for incident management and coordinate response processes within the team and with other university stakeholders (CISO, DPO and IT teams from other services)

Your profile

Essential

• Masters degree in computer science or equivalent
• 3+ years experience related to IT security in a Linux environment, including web applications
• Practical experience with Linux systems administration, preferably in a research environment
• In-depth understanding of Linux security-related services (firewall and SSH, authentication (2FA), key management, VPNs, SELinux, logging, monitoring, auditing, ...)
• Practical experience with IT security processes: risk assessment, penetration testing, system hardening
• Ability to write technical documentation and reports in compliance with IT security management frameworks
• Motivated to work collaboratively within the university and with peers in other organizations
• Fluent communication skills (written and oral) in English are required, German is an asset

• Certification in IT security tasks with relevance to Linux environments
• Experience with virtualization environments (KVM/Xen) and container technologies (Docker/Singularity)
• Experience with IT security in OpenStack environment (or equivalent cloud technology)

We offer you

• A highly interdisciplinary work environment with challenging tasks

• Work within an agile team of experienced and highly motivated IT specialists
• Opportunity to work and gain experience with cutting-edge computing technologies, from hardware to management tools
• Opportunity to be actively involved in the development of a strategic, flexible and secure ICT environment for research in Switzerland