Senior Technical Lead of Research Infrastructure

Senior Technical Lead of Research Infrastructure

University of Colorado Boulder

• Seniority level:
  Mid‑Senior level
• Employment type:
  
  Full‑time
• Job function:
  Information Technology
• Industries:
  Higher Education

The Office of Information Technology encourages applications for a Senior Technical Lead of Research Infrastructure. This role provides technical leadership and hands‑on expertise for research computing infrastructure, including HPC systems (Alpine), research storage (Peta Library, scratch), and Blanca clusters. The Lead serves as the senior technical expert and primary mentor for HPC Specialists and Storage System Administrators within the Research Infrastructure Technology (RIT) team.

This position translates architectural direction from the Associate Director into practical implementation, leads complex technical work, and develops team capabilities through direct mentorship and guidance.

CU is an Equal Opportunity Employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment. We are committed to creating a workplace where all individuals are treated with respect and dignity, and we encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.

• OIT will be valued by campus as a strategic, inclusive and innovative partner in advancing learning and discovery in order to enable CU Boulder to be an outstanding public university.

• OIT enables campus priorities by providing high-value IT services and solutions.

• Trust, as a foundation for how we engage with one another and with campus partners, along with
• Curiosity in how to better support the campus and our partner’s while
• Encouraging empowerment and authentic engagement among ourselves and
• Celebrating a culture that promotes a sense of belonging while acknowledging that each person is unique and valued.

• OIT will advance learning and discovery by delivering high-value reliable IT services and solutions that:
• Provide a fluid and adaptable academic and student experience
• Enable research competitiveness and
• Deliver core infrastructure and enterprise IT services for business efficiency.

• Technical Leadership & Implementation
  :
  Translate architectural direction into hands‑on infrastructure solutions, serve as the team’s primary technical escalation point, shape day‑to‑day technical decision‑making, establish and maintain technical standards, procedures, and practices, tackle multi‑system issues spanning infrastructure domains, and champion automation, monitoring, and operational improvements that strengthen system reliability.
• Systems Administration & Operations
  :
  Perform hands‑on administration of HPC clusters, storage systems (ZFS, RAID, GPFS, Lustre), and parallel computing infrastructure; lead complex system changes, upgrades, and optimizations; conduct hardware repairs, OS configuration (Linux/Unix), and software updates; optimize system performance, resource utilization, and data‑transfer capabilities (Globus); manage compute resources and job schedulers (SLURM); automate infrastructure provisioning through configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef); and develop monitoring and observability platforms (Nagios, Grafana).
• Team Mentorship & Capability Development
  :
  Mentor HPC and Storage System Administrators on technical skills and problem‑solving approaches; provide hands‑on guidance during complex implementations and troubleshooting; develop team capabilities through pairing, code reviews, and guided learning; coach team members on user documentation and knowledge‑sharing; support cross‑training initiatives to reduce single points of failure; and champion a collaborative problem‑solving culture within the RIT team.
• Documentation & Knowledge Management
  :
  Maintain technical runbooks, procedures, and troubleshooting guides; document system configurations and implementation details; create and update architectural diagrams; build knowledge base and wiki; and conduct technical knowledge‑sharing sessions.
• Multi‑functional Collaboration & Support
  :
  Coordinate with User Support (UST), Data…