Senior Research Computing Systems Engineer

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.

• 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 troubleshooting skills.
• 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.
• Configuration management experience.
• 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…).

• 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 as a deployment and orchestration framework.
• Experience with virtualization and/or container technologies (VMware, Proxmox, KVM, Podman, Apptainer).
• Experience with MongoDB in a sharded architecture.
• Low latency networking experience (e.g., Infini Band, DOCA-OFED)
• Experience compiling, installing, and running open-source software, including software using MPI libraries
• Experience in debugging and tuning of software applications on HPC clusters, experience with common scientific libraries and applications.
• Experience deploying open-weight AI models.
• Experience deploying Open OnDemand, Jupyter Notebook and supporting technologies.
• Clustered file system expertise (e.g., GPFS).

$80,000-$116,000

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