Senior Research Computing Systems Engineer

The University of Vermont is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other category legally protected by federal or state law.

For information on safety and security at the University of Vermont, see the annual security report by clicking on the Clery Act button in the sidebar menu.

Finalists for positions at UVM may be subject to a criminal background check.

For classified staff positions, actual hiring pay dependent on current competitor market conditions, comparable campus peer(s) at time of hire, and candidate's experience level and length.

This Research Computing Systems Engineer position provides expert support for the Vermont Advanced Computing Center’s ( VACC ) research computing systems and helps build and maintain state-of-the-art high performance computing ( HPC ) solutions for our researchers. This position joins a team that supports the HPC hardware, large-scale storage systems, cluster software, and researcher software in the VACC .

The VACC has four research clusters, including multi-thousand core "big compute" resources and GPU
-focused resources, and a massive in-memory database cluster. This position will support the VACC computing and storage hardware infrastructure, as well as research computing software such as Slurm, Open On Demand  and related technologies. This position directly supports UVM’s goal of enhancing IT resources and infrastructure available to the UVM research community.

The position will work with other VACC IT staff to install, maintain, and support research software and tools used by the UVM research community. In collaboration with Research Computing Facilitators, this position will respond to a wide range of requests submitted by researchers, providing guidance and expertise in software installation and troubleshooting.

This position will assess the needs of our faculty, helping adjust the VACC compute resources to better meet their needs for research and academic purposes. The position will actively support academic use of VACC resources, working with faculty to expand HPC into the classroom.

Scripting is an important skill for this position, both for cluster administration, and for helping users take advantage of the VACC cluster. A change to any part of the VACC resources is likely to affect hundreds of users, working on millions of dollars of research, so systematic attention to detail, careful planning and judgement are critical.

Minimum Qualifications (or equivalent combination of education and experience)

• Bachelor’s degree in STEM related field.
• 5 years of experience as a Linux Systems Administrator/Engineer.
• A thorough knowledge of Linux operating systems, network architecture and Linux shell scripting.
• Expertise with system and network debugging.
• Excellent customer service ethic, effective communication skills and collaborative approach to teamwork.
• Skilled at learning and evaluating new technologies and ability to determine if appropriate for adoption.
• An appreciation for infrastructure as code.
• Ability to work effectively on team and independent projects, with ability to self-direct and adjust to shifts in priorities.
• Expertise with at least one systems programming language (C, C++, Python, Perl, Rust, etc…).

Desirable Qualifications

• Significant prior experience with high performance computing systems and scientific software.
• Expertise with HPC technologies, such as job schedulers like Slurm, module systems like Lmod, package managers like Spack, CUDA .
• Experience with Ansible…