fortran_gnu

12 Companies hiring FORTRAN Engineers

Not dead yet! IBM's 1950s Formula Translator (FORTRAN) sits in 30th position on the TIOBE index (May 2022), and has regained some popularity in the High Performance Computing (HPC) world.

Given its ability to run on 18kb of RAM (at least originally - IBM704), the language has held on for decades as a highly performant tool for mathematics and data analysis. Primarily used in research institutions (ex: Three-Body Problem).

But I wanted to scrape around on the internet and find some non-research companies actively hiring for the Fortran developers. Most of these are pulled from public listings which may include irrelevant languages, so I've tried to filter down to companies with explicit Fortran based products.

I found a handfull of companies, typically distributed across these 6 industries:

The top 12:

Ranked in order of Most needing Fortran to Least needing Fortran

1. Hewlett Packard (Compiler & HPC)

HP maintains the Cray Compilation Environment (CCE), so it makes sense they would have a need for Fortran developers. This position mentions updating standards to support Fortran 2023 (F202X)

2. NVIDIA (Graphics Cards)

Not surprising since Nvidia has CUDA FORTRAN, a Fortran analog to their CUDA C compiler. CUDA Fortran is a lower-level explicit programming model that allows direct control of GPGPU programming.

3. Intel (HPC)

A few positions requiring Fortran open at Intel. These seem related to the Aurora Exascale system development. (Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of at least one exaflop or a billion billion calculations per second (10^18))

4. General Atomics (Energy - HPC)

General Atomics is an Energy and Defense conglomerate. This position is likely under their nuclear fission / fusion group, working on plasma simulations (MHD and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

5. Raytheon Technologies (Aerospace - HPC)

Another HPC application, this time for the simulation and testing of jet engine design. Under the Pratt & Whitney division, the Survivability Engineering team is developing software tools for simulations and data management regarding infrared and radar electromagnetic evaluation of systems.

6. Tomorrow.io (Weather)

Weather and climate forecasting is a notoriously complicated space. There's a massive ecosystem of Fortran tools for weather modeling stretching back to the 1980s, and it's often not worth reinventing the wheel (Climate Models: Challenges for Fortran Development Tools).

7. Jacobs Engineering Group (Aerospace - Orbital Modeling)

Develop computer simulation models of hypervelocity impacts on spacecraft materials and perform risk assessment of MMOD impacts on spacecraft components.

8. Karman+ (Aerospace - Asteroid Mining)

"We are going to mine near-earth asteroids to provide abundant, sustainable water and mineral resources for the space economy."

Seems that Karman+ literally plans for asteroid mining, starting with retrieval & recovery of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). I imagine this is similar to the Jacobs "MMOD" position. Keeping track of a large number of orbiting bodies.

9. Nasa (Aerospace - Jet Propulsion)

Including Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here. The Solar System Dynamics Group (SSD) is responsible for mapping and maintaining a database of the 8 planets, 160+ natural satellites, and over one million comets and asteroids.

10. Amazon (Cloud / HPC) [Needs Verification]

Same as the Apple case. Listed as a requirement, but I'm unable to find active AWS development in Fortran. I have no doubt that some Fortran code exists somewhere on the AWS HPC team, but hard to say whether it is a priority.

11. Apple (Computers / HPC) [Needs Verification]

It's unclear if there is a direct Fortran position at Apple or if the HR team is just a little overzealous in their requirements. I wasn't able to spot any public facing Fortran tools for Mac, but it's possibly used in their HPC team.

??. GE Power (Energy)

Including this one only for the laughs. Perhaps there is a WASM port for Fortran... but I wouldn't typically categorize it under "front-end-technologies".

Verification

Still working on verifying a few names in this list, and I'll keep it updated as I receive feedback.

Sent out quite a few of these:

Hey ${name}, I'm writing up a "10+ companies hiring for Fortran" kind of blog. I see it as a requirement for ${company} positions. Just wanted to verify that it was for real, and not just overzealous job requirements.

Tyler

Also feel free to shoot me an email (tyler@rysolv.com) if you're actively developing in Fortran and you think your company should be on the list.

Tyler Maran

Engineer. Co-Founded Rysolv. I tweet sometimes.