Internship area:Front Line Software Support Engineers (FLSSE)

1. Purpose and expected value of the practice The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is one of the most advanced astronomical observatories in the world. Located in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, ALMA relies on highly complex and distributed software and infrastructure to support continuous scientific operations.

Within this environment, observatory services and software components operate across multiple sites and computing environments, generating large volumes of logs and system metrics. Centralized collection, storage, indexing, and visualization of this information are important for monitoring system health, investigating failures, analyzing performance, and supporting the operation and maintenance of the observatory infrastructure. The current observability infrastructure makes use of the Elasticsearch suite to manage and analyze logs and host-related metrics.

Nonetheless, this infrastructure uses a free tier subscription, limiting us from using advanced observability features such as anomaly detection or integration with our credential systems for managing the access to the visualization platform, among other features. As the observatory's infrastructure evolves, it is critical to evaluate alternative technologies that can provide similar capabilities while meeting ALMA's long-term technical, operational, cybersecurity, and maintenance requirements.

2. Proposed project The project will begin with an analysis of the existing Elasticsearch implementation used by the observatory, including its architecture, configuration, data flows, integrations, and operational requirements.



The student will then study the OpenSearch suite and investigate migration strategies, compatibility considerations, available migration tools, and experiences from organizations that have migrated from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch.

As part of the project, the student will implement a small proof-of-concept OpenSearch cluster. The PoC will be used to evaluate the main components required by the observatory's use case and to identify potential technical challenges related to deployment, configuration, data ingestion, indexing, querying, monitoring, and integration with existing infrastructure. The results of the investigation will provide ALMA engineers with a technical assessment of OpenSearch and a preliminary migration strategy.

The work will help determine whether OpenSearch is a suitable candidate for future observability infrastructure and identify the effort, risks, and architectural changes that would be required for a potential migration.

3. Learning experience

Through this experience, the student will gain practical knowledge of distributed infrastructure, observability systems, search and analytics technologies, containerized services, Linux systems, and infrastructure management in a large-scale scientific environment. The internship will also provide an opportunity to work with experienced engineers and contribute to the evaluation of technologies that could support the long-term reliability and maintainability of ALMA's infrastructure.

Students of Informatics Civil Engineer.

Internship details

- Application deadline: November 9, 2026, 12:00 PM (Chile time).
- Internship start date: January 2027
- Internship end date: March 2027

📌 ALMA Summer Intern 2027- 1 Informatics Civil Engineer (Software team) (Vitacura)
🏢 ALMA Observatory
📍 Vitacura