Research Computing Lead (SYS ADM 4 TX

Job Summary

#CA-PS THIS IS AVAILABLE TO EMPLOYEES IN THE DEPARTMENT OF L&S IT SERVICES ONLY.

Under broad direction of the Executive Director of Information Technology, the Research Computing Lead provides technical, operational, and program leadership for research computing infrastructure across the College of Letters and Science. This position leads the development of a sustainable, supportable, and security-aligned research computing service model for research servers, research workstations, network-attached and other research storage, and related infrastructure used by faculty, researchers, graduate students, and staff.

The Research Computing Lead serves as the senior technical authority and service owner for LS IT research computing standards, lifecycle practices, and operational models. The position leads the virtual Research Computing Support Team; coordinates the work of systems administrators, desktop engineering staff, storage and infrastructure specialists, and senior desktop support analysts supporting research-intensive departments; and establishes repeatable practices for inventory, intake, configuration management, patching, endpoint protection, vulnerability management, monitoring, logging, backup, access control, exception management, and researcher-facing service documentation.

The role balances research flexibility with institutional, campus, UC, and sponsor security obligations. It partners with faculty and research groups to preserve the ability to conduct specialized research while moving research systems out of isolated, one-off support patterns and into documented service tiers with clear ownership, support boundaries, technical baselines, lifecycle planning, and risk treatment. The position also collaborates with campus partners, including central IT, information security, high-performance computing, cloud, networking, storage, and research support organizations, to help researchers choose appropriate local, campus HPC, cloud, storage, or shared infrastructure options.

This is a senior individual contributor and technical leadership role. It does not require direct supervisory authority, but it is responsible for setting direction, coordinating work across teams, leading complex technical initiatives, advising leadership, and ensuring measurable progress toward the College's research computing support and compliance goals.

8/26/2026 at 11:59pm

THIS IS AVAILABLE TO EMPLOYEES IN THE DEPARTMENT OF L&S IT SERVICES ONLY.

Minimum Qualifications - For full consideration, applicants are encouraged to upload license and/or certification if required of the position

• No Minimum Education required.
• Advanced experience administering research or infrastructure systems in production or research environments, including installation, configuration, troubleshooting, patching, account/access management, network configuration, storage integration, service management, and lifecycle support for physical servers, virtual machines, workstations, and/or storage platforms across one or more operating systems.
• Demonstrated experience building or operating repeatable systems management practices using automation, configuration management, endpoint management, or scripting tools such as Puppet, Ansible, Big Fix, shell scripting, Python, Git, or comparable tools.
• Demonstrated experience implementing security and operational controls for infrastructure, platform, or research systems, including identity and access management, least privilege, vulnerability remediation, endpoint/security tooling, logging, monitoring, backup coordination, incident response, or risk/exception tracking.
• Experience leading complex technical work across multiple stakeholders or teams, including setting technical standards, coordinating implementation work, resolving competing priorities, documenting decisions, and reporting progress, risks, or tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience consulting with customers, researchers, faculty, business partners, or equivalent stakeholders to translate specialized technical requirements into supportable infrastructure, service, or operational solutions.
• Demonstrated knowledge of research computing architecture concepts, including workload placement, system lifecycle management, storage and backup considerations, and the tradeoffs between local infrastructure, shared services, and cloud platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to produce clear technical standards, procedures, inventories, dashboards, or other documentation and to communicate risks, requirements, and recommendations effectively

• Experience supporting research computing, scientific computing, academic research, laboratory, national lab, medical research, or other environments with specialized software, instruments, workflows, researcher-administered systems, or shared research infrastructure.
• Experience designing or supporting high-performance computing, cloud, containerized, or portable…