HPC Linux System Administrator

At NASA's Johnson Space Center, the Flight Sciences Laboratory (FSL) is the computing backbone behind nearly every major human spaceflight program - ISS, Orion, SLS, Commercial Crew, Lunar Gateway, and the Human Landing System: 700+ machines, 26,000 cores, 10+ petabytes of storage, 1,000+ users. MRI Technologies, supporting NASA under the JETS II contract, is hiring an HPC Linux System Administrator to help run and improve that cluster - a hands-on, on-premises HPC role administering the job scheduler and parallel file system, supporting containerized HPC workflows and CI/CD (including Jacamar), and working directly with the scientists and engineers behind NASA's human spaceflight mission.

This is not a public-cloud, Dev Ops-only, or Kubernetes-only position.

Your HPC experience doesn't have to say "NASA" on it. Another NASA center, a national lab, a university/research computing center, or another government agency all count - and your title doesn't have to have been "System Administrator." We want someone who'll bring fresh ideas from wherever they've been.

Based in Houston, TX at NASA Johnson Space Center - fully remote considered for the right candidate with strong, demonstrated HPC experience.

Required
- Core HPC Experience (Must Have)

• Hands-on, production experience ADMINISTERING an HPC job scheduler (Slurm, PBS/Torque, or LSF) - a hard requirement, not a preference. This means administering the scheduler itself (queue/partition configuration, accounting, troubleshooting job failures), not just submitting jobs to one.
• Hands-on, production experience ADMINISTERING a high-speed parallel file system (Lustre or GPFS) - also a hard requirement. General NAS/SAN/NFS storage administration does not substitute for this.
• Minimum 5 years of Linux system administration in an on-premises, bare-metal, or cluster/research-computing environment. Cloud-only or Dev Ops-only backgrounds (e.g., managing EC2/AKS/EKS without on-prem HPC cluster experience) do not meet this requirement.

Required
- General

• Typically requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent certification in a related field, with a minimum of 5 years of experience
• Experience using containers in an HPC context - packaging and running user environments (including older OS or older package versions) on a shared cluster rather than for traditional microservices
• Experience building and supporting CI/CD workflows, ideally tied to HPC clusters and run nodes
• System configuration management experience
• Experience with monitoring and alerting systems
• Demonstrated problem-solving, planning, and communication skills
• Ability to work effectively in a team environment
• Must be able to provide proof of U.S. Citizenship or U.S. Permanent Residency and complete a U.S. government background investigation (required for this NASA contract - see Important Information below).

Preferences

• Experience with Red Hat-based Linux distributions
• Familiarity with Infini Band high-speed networking
• Experience with provisioning tools (xCAT, Warewulf)
• Experience with Ansible and/or Foreman for configuration management
• Familiarity with SPACK software package manager
• Experience with log consolidation, monitoring, and Git/Git Lab (including CI/CD pipelines)
• Familiarity with Jacamar () or comparable tooling for running CI/CD jobs against HPC clusters and run nodes
• Experience applying AI in a sysadmin role - integrating AI tooling into operational workflows, automation, and user-facing HPC jobs
• MPI workflow and administration experience (e.g., Open MPI, MPICH, Intel MPI)
• Package management and environment modules experience (e.g., Lmod/Environment Modules, SPACK, Easy Build)
• Knowledge of NASA security mechanisms (security plans, POAMs, ATOs, Risk Assessments)

This position has been…