HPC Systems Administrator

Department

Provost Research Computing Center

The University of Chicago Research Computing Center (RCC), a unit in the Office of Research, provides high‑end research computing resources to researchers at the University of Chicago. It is dedicated to enabling research by providing access to centrally managed High‑Performance Computing (HPC), storage, and visualization resources. These resources include hardware, software, high‑level scientific and technical user support, and the education and training required to help researchers make full use of modern HPC technology and local and national supercomputing resources.

The Office of Research oversees the conduct of sponsored research, research program development, and contract management functions.

The University of Chicago is seeking a highly qualified HPC Systems Security Engineer to join the HPC Systems and Operations team that builds and manages RCC's HPC infrastructure. The individual in this position will be involved in the operation, maintenance, security, and compliance of large‑scale complex HPC systems primarily used for research. This position designs automated, scalable, and rapidly deployable solutions to infrastructure development and server configuration.

The engineer works independently to install, configure, and maintain operating systems, monitors and alerts systems, utility software, and firewalls, and guides maintenance for production servers as well as Windows and Linux servers. This is a hybrid position requiring at least three days working onsite.

• Design, deploy, configure, and administer CPU/GPU HPC clusters, including management of compute nodes, storage infrastructure, interconnects such as Infini Band, and physical infrastructure in the datacenter and related systems.
• Monitor, configure, maintain and tune GPU nodes for optimal performance and utilization following state‑of‑the‑art practices for the required workloads.
• Assist with the development and implementation of monitoring and observability tools and infrastructure, collection and aggregation of metrics, and development of dashboards.
• Develop, maintain, and enforce security procedures and system documentation for operational and compliance purposes.
• Tune, secure, and maintain the HPC job scheduling environment, including fair‑sharing, accounting, and policy enforcement.
• Troubleshoot and resolve operational, performance, and issues across HPC hardware and software stacks. Coordinate with hardware and software vendors to address defects, vulnerabilities, and performance issues. Assist the Computational Scientists team with user support and helpdesk tickets, including elevated support for security‑protected environments.
• Assist with the implementation and maintenance of secure and reliable backup, archival, disaster‑recovery, and restore capabilities for systems and research data.
• Perform vulnerability scanning, patch management, system and firmware updates across the infrastructure.
• Maintain complex systems and network administration functions. Work with moderated guidance to administer simple systems and assist in the administration of larger systems.
• Maintain all supporting documentation for comprehensive operating system, hardware and software configuration. Monitor primary responses for information technology related security incidents and violations. Keep current with new security and network monitoring technologies, applicable laws and regulations.
• Plan and install necessary patches and upgrades for servers and their associated storage, network, communications, and peripheral sub‑systems. Install and maintain an appropriate level of intrusion detection, monitoring, and auditing software as required.
• Track compliance and maintain documentation for hardware, software, and service inventories for management reports.
• Perform other related work as needed.

• Education:
  
  college or university degree in a related field.
• Work experience:
  
  5–7 years in a related job discipline.

• Linux system administration experience in a large, distributed computing environment.
• Demonstrated experience and knowledge…