Senior AI Systems Administrator

Senior AI Systems Administrator (Contract) | Cambridge | £500 to £600 per day | Outside IR35

A not-for-profit AI organisation in central Cambridge needs an experienced contractor to build and run its GPU infrastructure. You’ll provision and look after multi-rack GPU clusters used for training and inference, from the hardware and fabric up to orchestration. Researchers and engineers rely on this platform every day.

What you’ll deliver

Multi-rack GPU servers deployed, tuned and stable under training and inference workloads
High-performance networking built and maintained (Infini Band, RDMA, RoCE), plus the switches, routers and firewalls around it
The estate managed as code with Git and Terraform/Open Tofu, so it’s repeatable and handed over cleanly
Linux hosts, hypervisors and VMs administered across Ubuntu and RHEL
Ongoing tuning with the people who use the systems, based on how they actually run them

You’ll need

A strong track record as a Systems Administrator, HPC Engineer or MLOps Engineer, ideally on contract
Hands-on GPU server deployment and tuning at multi-rack scale
Strong Infini Band/RDMA/RoCE skills and solid network design
Advanced Linux, virtualisation and infrastructure-as-code skills
The ability to get productive quickly in a small, collaborative team Useful extras:
Lustre, Ceph, Weka or PEAK:

AIO storage;
Slurm or LSF;
Python scripting.

The details

Rate: £500 to £600 per day, Outside IR35
Duration: 3 months, with scope to extend
Start: ASAP

Location:

3 days a week on site, in an office a few minutes’ walk from Cambridge station

Hours:

UK business hours only, with no on-call rota. Major maintenance is occasionally scheduled for a weekend, agreed in advance