Research Computing Systems Engineer

Stanford Research Computing is looking for a talented systems engineer to join our team of collaborative and innovative professionals helping Stanford's faculty and students use advanced computing and data tools to explore new frontiers in knowledge and solve some of humanity's most urgent problems. Our staff work directly with some of the world's top researchers in a broad range of disciplines, across all of Stanford's seven schools — while also supporting and learning from each other in cross-project endeavors.

We maintain and steadily improve an advanced research computing facility, and we support a variety of environments for Stanford research. In Stanford Research Computing, you'll have a rare opportunity to contribute to discoveries and inventions that have global reach and positive impact, and to share in the curiosity and commitment of the scholars and scientists who lead these projects.

Stanford Research Computing is looking for a talented systems engineer to join our team of collaborative and innovative professionals helping Stanford's faculty and students use advanced computing and data tools to explore new frontiers in knowledge and solve some of humanity's most urgent problems. Our staff work directly with some of the world's top researchers in a broad range of disciplines, across all of Stanford's seven schools — while also supporting and learning from each other in cross-project endeavors.

We maintain and steadily improve an advanced research computing facility, and we support a variety of environments for Stanford research. In Stanford Research Computing, you'll have a rare opportunity to contribute to discoveries and inventions that have global reach and positive impact, and to share in the curiosity and commitment of the scholars and scientists who lead these projects.

Stanford Research Computing operates a portfolio of large-scale HPC clusters and petabyte-scale storage systems serving thousands of researchers. Every one of those platforms depends on a layer of shared infrastructure that researchers never see: the bastion hosts our administrators pass through to reach management networks, the network license servers that let research software start, the container hosts carrying our internal services, and the observability stack that tells us something is wrong before a researcher has to.

In this role you will be the primary steward of that layer, serving as lead for the 'backbone' services the rest of our environment depends on. You will also contribute to a co-location initiative, standing up management infrastructure and geographically distinct replication in a remote data center. The work spans a wide range of technologies, with substantial engineering ahead in hardware lifecycle, redundancy, and configuration management.

You won't be maintaining back-office IT. You will be building the connective tissue that a multi-petabyte, multi-platform research computing environment runs on — the systems that decide whether a downtime is a scheduled inconvenience or a lost quarter of someone's research.

• Bastion hosts:
  Lead the administration, hardening, and modernization of bastion and jump hosts across multiple data centers, and design the next generation with redundancy and high availability. Support partner unit administrators moving from VDI to bastion-based access.
• Network license services:
  Operate and improve the primary and secondary FLEXlm license servers behind commercial research and statistical software. Right-size firewall policy, retire orphaned license hosts, and bring runbooks and user documentation current.
• Central observability service:
  Lead the central observability service and the…