Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

I am Jonathan Mace, and I am a faculty member at MPI-SWS (my position is equivalent to a US assistant professor). I lead the Cloud Software Systems research group, and I am actively looking for new PhD students to join my group in fall 2019. I am also hiring interns year-round (interns are typically at the late-stage undergrad or graduate level). A quick brief about the institute more generally: MPI-SWS is a world-class academic research institution located in the German cities of Saarbrücken and Kaiserslautern. Our faculty are world leaders in many research areas including cloud & distributed systems, computer networks, operating systems, security, privacy, programming languages, verification, and more. My group's goal is to make it easier to operate large software systems and to understand their behavior at runtime. Our research entails designing new abstractions for building distributed systems, new techniques for measuring and understanding their performance, and new tools for analyzing their behavior both online and offline. The type of systems we work with include those offered by public cloud providers (Google Cloud, AWS), open-source systems like those in the Hadoop ecosystem, and emerging paradigms like microservice architectures and function-as-a-service platforms. My group's research has a significant practical element, and applicants will need to be comfortable diving into unfamiliar code bases and rapidly prototyping new ideas.