Systems Administration SME – Research AI & Applications

Systems Administration SME Research AI & Applications Location: Cambridge, MA Hybrid (3 days onsite/week) Type: Contract Job Summary We are seeking a hands-on Systems Administration SME to support the secure, reliable, and compliant operation of cloud-hosted research applications, AI systems, and scientific SaaS platforms. The role will work across GCP, AWS, containers, APIs, AI/agentic systems, scientific databases, and third-party platforms, partnering with IT, developers, scientists, cybersecurity, and vendors. Key Responsibilities Administer GCP, AWS, and SaaS environments, including IAM, networking, storage, compute, quotas, and access controls.Manage Cloud Run, Docker/containers, Artifact Registry, DNS, TLS, load balancing, and IAP.Support SaaS integrations, APIs, service accounts, secrets, credentials, and least-privilege access.Maintain container images, dependencies, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code with proper security and rollback controls.Monitor logs, metrics, alerts, system performance, AI/model failures, and cloud usage/costs.Troubleshoot production issues, support incident/root-cause analysis, backups, recovery, and disaster recovery.Maintain runbooks, documentation, audit trails, and operational processes using ServiceNow and Jira.Support security, vulnerability remediation, compliance, and transition of research prototypes into secure production environments. Required Qualifications: Bachelor s degree in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or related field.8+ years of production systems administration experience in GCP, AWS, Azure, or similar cloud environments.5+ years of experience with Linux, Docker/containers, Python environments, APIs, networking, DNS, TLS, IAM, secrets management, and Kubernetes/Cloud Run.Strong knowledge of CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, monitoring, incident management, backup/recovery, patching, and vulnerability remediation.Experience with ServiceNow and Jira.Experience with GCP services such as Cloud Run, IAP, Secret Manager, Artifact Registry, Cloud Monitoring, Gemini/Vertex AI is highly desirable.Scientific computing, bioinformatics, laboratory automation, research data platforms, or scientific SaaS experience is a plus. Must be willing to work onsite in Cambridge, MA 3 days per week.