Lead Systems Engineer (HPC)

Responsibilities

• Design, maintain, troubleshoot, and refine advanced HPC/AI cluster infrastructure including high-performance interconnects, cluster schedulers, and configuration management across research systems.
• Partner with colleagues in Advanced Data and Storage Management to align designs for scratch filesystems and data management with cluster designs.
• Develop data-transfer pathways and networks to support AI-driven computing workloads.
• Establish and maintain best practices for cluster management and usage to support AI-driven workloads.
• Develop, enhance, and expand monitoring infrastructure and related protocols for research computing systems.
• Plan and implement scheduled maintenance of operations, including during off hours.
• Perform other tasks as assigned.

Technical Leadership

• Define and drive the institutional technical strategy for advanced AI and data-intensive HPC.
• Bring creativity, foresight, and mature professional judgment in anticipating and solving novel and complex problems, in determining project objectives and requirements, and in developing standards and governance for all research computing platforms.
• Leveraging expertise in AI technologies, identify, evaluate, and pilot researcher-facing systems that enable the acceleration of research using AI.
• Lead the implementation and expand adoption of modern, automation-driven infrastructure and cluster management practices.
• Promote institution-wide collaboration as the community expert advising and working with faculty, researchers and vendors on emerging trends and challenges in AI-enabled research computing.
• Cultivate a collaborative, knowledge-sharing environment by providing technical mentorship to systems specialists and analysts by sharing designs and operational expertise across data systems and HPC/AI infrastructure.
• Contribute to the strategic vision for HPC/AI systems; advise senior leadership and stakeholders on strategic investments, risks, and opportunities related to research infrastructure.

Troubleshooting and Problem Resolution

• Monitor HPC clusters, networks, and storage systems for abnormalities, and resolve issues.
• Analyze and solve problems in Linux and HPC/AI computing environments with software, data, and job submissions.
• Use scripting and programming tools to troubleshoot issues.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of strong experience managing advanced research computing systems.
• Strong expertise with Linux system administration, installation, and troubleshooting.
• Advanced experience writing scripts in languages such as bash, Python and/or Perl.
• Proficient in managing networking in HPC environments.
• Strong experience managing software in an advanced research computing environment.
• Experience supporting scheduling and managing jobs (SLURM) in large-scale computing environments.
• Strong oral and written communication skills, with the ability to proactively engage peers and communicate effectively across a diverse stakeholder community.
• Strong ability to solve complex and system infrastructure problems, and share expertise with colleagues at all levels.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across teams to solve systems and infrastructure challenges, aligning day-to-day operational needs with longer-term technical and organizational goals as technologies evolve.