Scientific Computing Officer Structural Studies Scientific Computing LMB

Position: Scientific Computing Officer Structural Studies Scientific Computing LMB 2765
£45,869 - £51,547 per annum

This is fixed-term position to 30 September 2030 due to time limited funding from an external grant.

Overall purpose:

• To provide expert input to the day-to-day maintenance of the Institute's Scientific Computing facilities, diagnosing and troubleshooting problems that arise.

• To plan, install, commission and maintain compute and data storage resources supporting the research of the Institute, including Machine Learning.

• Assume technical and organisational lead responsibility for one or more computing resources.

• To maintain Scientific Computing services such as DNS, DHCP, Linux workstations, storage servers, backup systems and the computing cluster.

• To help optimise the connection of servers and end user PCs / Apple Macs to Unix equipment, eg remote desktops and file shares.

• To advise and assist users in the use of deep learning to analyse large datasets, including training and inference with computer vision or LLMs.

• To provide other general technical assistance as required, for example in backups and the maintenance of large file systems.

• To provide timely and pertinent communication to colleagues and users (as appropriate) by web, email or other documents.

• Contribute to writing of disaster recovery processes and documentation, as directed.

• Attendance and reporting to appropriate internal and external meetings.

• To liaise with management and scientists and advise where possible on IT solutions.

• This technical work will support the scientific mission of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology to understand life from molecules to organisms. The postholder will have a particular focus on neurobiology, including petabyte scale brain wiring data.

Main duties:

• To work with the Scientific Computing team, including taking responsibility as required for operational issues such as maintaining and troubleshooting the Institute's data storage and computing cluster during the absence of other team members, and attending meetings on behalf of the Scientific Computing group.

• To initiate and act as an independent project manager for discrete infrastructure services/projects, typically integrating diverse software components to provide a functioning whole, and reporting to the Head of Scientific Computing on significant milestones.

• In consultation with scientific and support staff and the Head of Scientific Computing, to propose, develop, implement, test, upgrade and maintain hardware and software solutions, especially those with application of deep learning to large datasets.

• To research, develop and maintain the Institute's High Performance Computer (HPC) cluster and multi-petabyte data storage systems which form the core of the Scientific computing infrastructure. This is a crucial and rapidly changing field which requires a high level of computing expertise and a knowledge of the scientific requirements of the institute's scientists.

• Creating and maintaining documentation describing the systems configuration and operation.

• To give technical support and assistance to users, whether that be troubleshooting technical problems or helping with personal user operating difficulties.

• Implementing hardware / software installations and upgrades.

Key Responsibilities

• To be responsible for the day-to-day provision and maintenance of Scientific Computing services across the institute, ensuring that systems run in a smooth manner and as transparently as possible for users, addressing and resolving all types of hardware and software problems efficiently within an appropriate time frame and providing support to users for both systems and applications when appropriate. This will include monitoring, maintaining, and repairing the central UNIX facilities, such as servers, application devices, switches and maintenance of the Institute's UNIX desktop and laptop machines (currently 80 machines), together with the cluster and associated servers (currently 600 machines), and also assist with the maintenance and integrity of the Institute's data storage, backup, disaster recovery and archive systems.

• To contribute to the Scientific Computing team effort in providing a state-of-the-art…