Cyberinfrastructure Engineer

PSD Enrico Fermi Institute:
Gardner Group

The MANIAC Lab, located within the Enrico Fermi Institute of the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, builds and operates advanced cyberinfrastructure for scientific instruments investigating the fundamental mysteries of nature. The Lab operates data-intensive high-throughput computing facilities that are part of a global computing grid used to reconstruct and analyze particle collisions recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland ((Use the "Apply for this Job" box below).).

The Lab also serves as a gateway for U.S. researchers to national cyberinfrastructure resources through the Open Science Grid Consortium (OSG) and the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP).

The Lab operates the NSF Shared Tier 3 Analysis Facility (). The facility supports ATLAS physicists analyzing the complete LHC Run 2 and Run 3 datasets as the collaboration prepares for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), which begins with Run 4 around 2030. It provides computing infrastructure and services for the South Pole Telescope (SPT-3G) and operates a worldwide distributed data network for the XENON dark matter search experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy.

The Lab is increasingly focused on AI-enabled research computing. Its GPU platforms support machine learning training and inference, including models served through NVIDIA Triton and large language models hosted on facility hardware. The Lab has also built an agentic AI platform based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It gives researchers' AI assistants secure, identity-brokered access to facility services such as HTCondor, Kubernetes, Rucio, and Service

X. The same platform supports AI-assisted facility operations, where sandboxed agents analyze operational metrics and propose corrective actions for human review.

The Lab provides the Scalable Systems Laboratory (SSL), a software testing and integration platform for IRIS-HEP. IRIS-HEP develops software and computing solutions for the HL-LHC era. Through the SSL Deployment Factory, the Lab is packaging the Kubernetes infrastructure it already operates into tested, versioned bundles that other facilities can deploy. These bundles are bootstrapped with Kubespray and managed through Git Ops with Flux, and cover services such as Jupyter Hub, Binder Hub, ServiceX, and the MCP platform.

The goal is to shorten a process that currently takes months of manual work at each site.

As the Cyberinfrastructure Engineer at the MANIAC Lab within the Enrico Fermi Institute, you will report directly to Research Assistant Professor Giordon Stark. As part of our team (), you will help build and operate advanced cyberinfrastructure for science collaborations such as the ATLAS experiment at the CERN LHC. These collaborations rely on data-intensive, distributed computing technologies such as HTCondor, Kubernetes, and Ceph.

The Cyberinfrastructure Engineer will help operate the storage, compute, and GPU infrastructure in the University's campus data centers. This infrastructure connects researchers to the national-scale OSG fabric and to emerging AI/ML service platforms. The work combines hands-on Linux systems administration and on-site hardware support with cloud-native operations using Kubernetes, Helm, containers, and Git Ops tooling. It also involves distributed storage (Ceph via Rook, ZFS), configuration management (Puppet), and monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana).

The team is collaborative and partly distributed. We meet weekly over Zoom and coordinate daily in Slack. Team members…