We are seeking a Team Leader (A3) for the Workflow Design and Integration Team, which sits at the heart of ECMWF’s operational forecasting systems. The team plays a crucial role in delivering ECMWF’s operational weather, environmental and climate services by ensuring that scientific and technical advances are integrated safely and efficiently into production.
This is a key operational, technical and leadership role at the intersection of science, software engineering, high-performance computing, machine learning and 24/7 operational delivery. You will provide technical and people leadership for the team responsible for ensuring that ECMWF’s prediction systems and services run reliably in production, while improving and modernising their workflows and integrating changes safely into operations.
The role spans the operational implementation of upgrades to ECMWF’s Integrated Forecasting System and Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System, Copernicus and Destination Earth production workflows, and the adaptation of operational suites to new and upgraded computing environments.
As Team Leader, you will set direction and priorities, develop the team and work closely with colleagues across ECMWF’s Forecasts and Services, Research and Computing Departments. The role requires hands-on technical credibility and practical leadership to manage dependencies, identify operational risks early and enable ECMWF to innovate quickly while protecting the reliability, traceability and quality of its operational systems and services.
The Workflow Design and Integration Team, currently encompassing 10 staff, is part of the Production Section in ECMWF’s Forecasts and Services Department. It co-designs, integrates, tests and supports the workflows that allow ECMWF’s prediction systems and environmental and climate services to run reliably in operational production.
The team plays an important role as operational forecasting moves towards a more diverse mix of physics-based and data-driven systems, new computing environments and more complex data flows. These developments require disciplined workflow design, reliable orchestration, clear release processes and close coordination across ECMWF.
The team ensures that input data, model execution, post-processing, archiving, monitoring and dissemination steps are aligned and robust. It oversees workflows used to produce operational weather forecasts from medium-range to seasonal timescales, as well as machine-learning-enabled forecasts, Copernicus climate reanalyses and atmospheric composition services and Destination Earth Digital Twins. It also monitors the performance of operational suites, provides second-line support when problems are escalated by ECMWF’s operators, and contributes to change, configuration, release and incident-management processes.
Working jointly with colleagues in research, development and operations, the team modernises workflow design and integrates scientific and technical developments safely into production. It co-owns and evolves the end-to-end Research-to-Operations process, helping to reduce technical barriers and ensure appropriate optimisation, reliability, testing, documentation and operational readiness. An important direction of travel is closer alignment of the workflows, configuration and tooling used in research and operations: co-designed so that advances flow into production with less friction and lower risk.
