HPC Software Engineer

About the role

We are hiring a HPC Software Engineer to design, operate and maintain clusters, servers, and workstations supporting services where science happens at ORNL! This position resides in the Emerging Technologies & Computing group in the Research Computing Division in the Information Technology Services Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Major Duties/Responsibilities

• Advocate and promote HPC and clustered computing software solutions to researchers who process large data sets, run simulations, and develop scientific code as part of their projects.
• Design, develop, optimize, and maintain scientific software, workflows, libraries, and tools for production HPC environments.
• Ensure the performance, scalability, portability, reliability, and maintainability of software running on production systems.
• Leverage automation, testing, and modern software engineering practices to minimize maintenance overhead and improve software quality and reproducibility.
• Collaborate with technical points of contact and research teams to install, port, optimize, benchmark, and tune scientific applications and toolsets.
• Support software environments for a wide range of computational workflows, including parallel and distributed applications, data-intensive pipelines, and accelerator-enabled workloads.
• Work closely with system administrators, infrastructure engineers, and researchers to align software solutions with available compute, storage, and networking resources.
• Contribute to CI/CD practices, software packaging, documentation, and sustainable development workflows for research computing environments.
• Deliver ORNL’s mission by aligning behaviors, priorities, and interactions with our core values of Impact, Integrity, Teamwork, Safety, and Service. Promote equal opportunity by fostering a respectful workplace – in how we treat one another, work together, and measure success.

Basic Qualifications

• BS degree in computer science, computer engineering, information technology, information systems, science, engineering, business, or a related discipline and a minimum of 5 years of aligned professional experience is required for consideration. An overall combination of equivalent education and experience may be considered.
• 3 or more years with managing UNIX/Linux Systems.
• 3 or more years of proven experience with configuration management and automation tools such as Git, Jenkins, Ansible, or Puppet.
• Moderate proficiency in at least one scripting language such as Bash, Python, or others.
• Experience performing advanced troubleshooting and system administration with Linux Servers.
• Experience supporting large data systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• A strong desire to innovate and identify new technologies and opportunities and be able to communicate the potential benefits of those choices to others within the team and our research partners.
• A collaborative and upbeat approach to thrive on the opportunity to build trust and credibility and ultimately become a trusted advisor to our research teams.
• Active DOE Q, active DOD Top Secret, or active DOD TS/SCI clearance is heavily preferred for consideration.
• Solid understanding of multiple operating systems and cluster technologies.
• Experience with Rocky/Centos/RHEL, Ubuntu, VMware.
• Understanding of HPC platforms to support users with SLURM job submissions and troubleshooting.
• Experience building and running containerized applications in an HPC environment.
• Experience with multiple deployment mechanisms like Diskless, Warewulf, and traditional deployment (cobbler, PXEboot, and/or Bright).
• Experience managing systems utilizing GPU (NVIDIA and AMD) clusters for AI/ML and/or image processing.
• Experience with performance and diagnostic tools for benchmarking, analysis and tuning of systems, networking, and storage.
• Experience with Grafana, CheckMK, Nagios, Zabbix, or other network and device monitoring systems.
• Experience with scientific software such as Matlab, R, Ansys, etc.
• Experience with cluster administrative tools as Spack, Ansible, Git, etc.
• Previous experience working in a government, scientific or other highly technical environment.
• Good documentation skills, including ability to prepare simple documentation web pages.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Motivated self-starter with the ability to work independently and to participate creatively in collaborative teams across the laboratory.
• Ability to function well in a fast-paced research environment, set priorities to accomplish multiple tasks within deadlines, and adapt to ever changing needs.