Research Infrastructure Engineer at University of Bath

March 10, 2024

Job Description

About the role

The Research Infrastructure Engineer will be a part of the Research and Computing team, responsible for the development and maintenance of the University’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) services and Research Storage services, applying technical expertise to resolve complex problems, support an active and growing user community, generate innovative ideas and enhance the delivery of the HPC and storage services. 

You will methodically analyse and improve existing systems and processes, ensuring their security and performance. Ensure systems change management is carried out in accordance with agreed standards and procedures, creating and managing software test and development environments. You will therefore design, script, code, test and document the deployment and development of Open Source commercial and custom software using agreed standards and tools to achieve well-engineered bespoke systems, especially when linking existing systems or providing novel interfaces to existing data. 

You will provide advice and assistance on service and component availability, employ through-life planning models to ensure systems meet business needs and inform customers of supplier product developments and upgrades, advising on implementation. You till developing implementation plans for complex requests for change, evaluating risks to infrastructure integrity and reviewing effectiveness of change implementation. 

Provide and maintain stable HPC and research storage services, ensuring maximum operation of service, alongside providing technical support to the active community of Research Computing users. This would be through technical knowledge transfer, assisting them with utilising the resources, debugging and optimisation, through innovative solutions that enrich and enhance user experience and service delivery. 

Supporting outreach activities to enable exploitation of cloud research services by a broader user-base, represent the University within the HPC community through regional and national HPC centres and the HPC Specialist Interest Group, undertake research into suppliers, markets and product and service categories and overall be a trusted advisor and advocate between IT and key University stakeholders. 

About you 

  • Experience of IT project management and more generally change management within a large organisation.
  • Detailed knowledge and experience of administering Linux servers and a working knowledge of Windows operating system.
  • Familiar with HPC technologies, including provisioning, job schedulers and low-latency interconnects.
  • Experience with HPC Job Schedulers such as SLURM, PBS and IBM LSF. 
  • Knowledge and experience in using one or more scripting languages, such as Bash, Python and SQL.
  • Experience with any cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, AWS and GCP. 
  • Understanding of parallel programming methodologies.
  • Experience in the design and delivery of training courses.

Location